Subject: Re: Extensibility in Syndication formats

From: "Lund, Ben" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 12:32:02 +0100

Hi All,

Some comments on various points raised in this thread:

On 18/08/2004 16:35, Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> Before continuing, I'd like to note that besides
> [perhaps] NewsMonster of the dozens of RSS aggregators
> I have seen in action none treat extensibility in RSS
> 1.0 any different from extensibility in RSS 2.0. It's
> all just XML and namespaces to them. The other
> aggregator authors on the list can pipe up and
> disagree with me if I am mistaken. 

Internally Urchin (http://urchin.sourceforge.net) treats data as RDF.  The
database schema has tables for storing the RSS-ish data, and a triple store
for everything else.  This allows it to capture, query on, and fully
reconstitute all the data that's imported, without the application having to
understand what it means.  (A version that converts Atom to RDF for will be
checked in to CVS in the next day or so.)

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:47:24 -0400, Dan Brickley wrote:

> I'd be interested to take this
> http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/jobs/biologicalsciences.rdf feed as a
> test for AtomPub's extensibility goals.

I'd also be very interested to see this rendered in Atom.  When I set up
this feed, modeling the jobs data as RDF seemed like the only sensible way
of conveying the information accurately.  For example, it is jobs, not job
adverts that have locations, and the nj:advertises -> nj:Job -> nj:city RDF
construct makes this nicely explicit.

> Perhaps in the future,
> scientifically minded job hunters will be able to go do a search on jobs 
> in their particular speciality and see the results using
> geographically-oriented tools.

And when we offer feeds of scientific conferences and events,  see them
displayed geographically too...  It's exactly this cross-over application we
had in mind when choosing the RDF model for this data.

Sam Ruby [2004-08-18 07:52-0400]:
> there are other serialization syntaxes than RDF/XML.

I turns out that the RDF/XML syntax didn't cause us any implementation
headaches at all.

Ta,
Ben

---

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