Atom "Category"

The latest working draft [1] of the Atom syndication format was just
published by the IETF Working Group, and it contains a new Category
construct (described below) that may be of interest over here.
 
Comments will be appreciated, although unless there's something
totally broken it seems likely this will be the form that will go into
the final Atom spec (I'm really posting just to try and gauge how
useful it seems from the SKOS point of view ;-)

The aim is to allow classification of weblog/news entries. This had to
be simple (XML) syntax. The compromise arrived at is pretty simple,
but works through reference to an external vocabulary in a way which
will hopefully (eventually) enable interoperability with SKOS-based
efforts.

	3.7 The Category Construct	
				
			Category constructs contain information about a category to which an	
			Atom feed or entry is associated.	
				
			3.7.1 The "term" Attribute	
				
			The "term" attribute will be a string which identifies the category	
			within the categorization scheme to which the entry or feed belongs.	
			Category constructs MUST have a "term" attribute.	
				
			3.7.2 The "scheme" Attribute	
				
			The is a URI that identifies a categorization scheme. Category	
			constructs MAY have a "scheme" attribute.	
				
			3.7.3 The "label" attribute	
				
			The "label" attribute provides a human-readable label that may be	
			displayed in end-user applications. Category constructs MAY have a	
			"label" attribute.

At this point in time it seems unlikely that Atom will be related to
RDF in the primary specification, hopefully a fairly clean mapping
will be possible (worse case scenario is yet-another-XML-syntax
through XSLT).

More on Atom at [2].

In a very near space, Morten Frederikson has built a wonderful little
plugin, "FOAF Output" [3]  for the WordPress blog/content management
system, part of which takes the user-defined categories (which
WordPress supports as a hierarchy of labels), automatically
constructing a little SKOS ontology based on this and annotating the
RSS 1.0 (RDF/XML) feed with the user's categorizations in a
machine-friendly fashion. Example at [4,5].

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://ietf.levkowetz.com/drafts/atompub/format/
[2] http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
[3] http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-plugin-foaf-output
[4] http://dannyayers.com/archives/author/site-admin/skos.rdf
[5] http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/



-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2005 09:48:35 UTC