- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 20:16:00 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
hi all Thought this might be of interest, and a counterbalance to the high-geekery concerning logic/inference over RDF. Rael Dornfest has written a nice xml.com article on RSS (the [RDF|Rich] Site Summary data format), giving historical context and an overview of the options and debates surrounding future of RSS and RSS-like technologies. http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/07/17/syndication/rss.html I try not to fwd URLs without adding commentary (whether value adding or not :-) so excuse my speculations. I find RSS interesting, having spent an age in the Dublin Core and RDF worlds where progress can seem slow. RSS has been picked up very fast by a certain community, but has a rather unclear future path. So articles like Rael's are useful as they hint at where RSS might meet the RDF/Dublin-Core world to mutual benefit... IMHO RDF has something to learn from the way in which the lightweight RSS format has taken off. While it's a pity the later RSS specs lack a mapping into the RDF model, the simplicity and ease of adoption of RSS (RDF-based on not) has to be admired. And we can always use XSLT to scrape RSS back into (eg) RDF/DC data structures... Interesting question is how to find the sweet spot between basic RSS (which offers barely more structure/semantics than HTML bulleted lists, ie. is great for table-of-contents syndication) and the alleged complexity of RDF. When working on RSS-based apps, I've found a need to add in various additional constructs (eg. subject classification), which use of XML namespaces might make more easy to do in a manageable fashion. Rael concludes... RSS is going to have to evolve or die as it gets pulled in different directions. If it can't support the directions required by different developers, it will fade in favor of more special purpose formats. Whether a successful evolution takes the form of a larger flat-file core RSS, or a more comprehensive relational framework, movement is nonetheless needed. It'll be very interesting to watch how RSS evolves. People are using it for everything, which suggests that requirements gathering for future evolutions of the core specification could turn out to be a nightmare. How to satisfy both the newsfeed aggregation community, the .mp3 piracy community, the web sitemaps crowd etc etc., ie finding commonalities across all the uses of RSS that allow sites to express more structured data whilst still remainining universally understandable. For example, RSS is being used to expose table of contents info for online Auction sites, job sites, music sites etc; currently the format doesn't allow clients to infer that the items described in RSS are jobs, audio tracks, auction items; but looking at the way RSS is used, such applications are looming... fun times :-) --danbri
Received on Tuesday, 18 July 2000 20:16:07 UTC