Re: Behind the times

Hammond, Tony wrote:
> Maybe there is too much emphasis on 'aggregators' (and by implication
>  'newsreaders') here.
> 
> I would suggest that we could usefully distinguish between the
> 'really simple syndication' branch of RSS who are concerned primarily
> with syndicating ephemeral content such as news headlines and blog
> entries and the 'RDF site summary' brach who are more concerned with
> a generic means for packaging and transporting metadata for delivery
> down to the desktop. The target of such an RSS feed (not necessarily
> a 'newsfeed' but perhaps more felicitously termed 'web feed' as per
> Guardian Unlimited usage :) could be any app which can read this
> simple RDF profile.

I concur with this.

One of the aims of RDF is to enable material to be labelled and
categorised *for posterity* - enabling it to be consumed, and enabling
rich metadata to be extracted and processed, by applications which
haven't yet been invented. People wanting to use RDF in this way will
want to use the most expressive and specific vocabularies that are
applicable to their domain. One thinks of librarians and curators of
specialised collections; content vendors; royalty collecting agencies;
publishers of specialist journals and archives; those wishing to
transport advertising using RDF; and many others.

That aim is (somewhat) at odds with those of the "Really Simple"
contingent, in that their applications (aggregators) are generally not
able to make use of the more exotic vocabularies, and may even find the
openness of RDF to arbitrary extension vocabularies to be an obstacle
that has to be overcome.

I've been lurking on this list for a few weeks now. I arrived here as a
member of the "Really Simple" crew (I've been writing an aggregator
portlet), but I'm slowly being drawn to the view that RSS 1.0, including
exotic extensions yet to be invented, could be consumed by a reasonably
simple aggregator. It's possible to write such an aggregator today, by
using a proper RDF parser with an inferencing engine. Mine doesn't do
this - it does a crude, heuristic XSLT transformation on the feeds it
consumes; but it would be possible, and I wish I had the time to figure
out how to consume future RDF correctly.

-- 
Jack.


 
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