RE: RSS data transience and the semantic web

Bob wrote:

>>What role can RSS 1.0 play in the semantic web considering the 
>>transience of the data? 

Dan Z wrote:

>The exciting part of the semantic 'web' (for me!) is the 
>inter-relationships of data/values - whereas most RSS data contains 
>largely string literals for the title/description, and no statements 
>that contain purely URIs for all three parts of the statement 

Here's a simple use case: I learn from an RSS feed about an article in an
online magazine on a topic I'm interested in. I read it, and decide that the
author is so clever and insightful that I want to check out other pieces by
the same author. The publication has been storing information about who
wrote what in machine-readable triples for the last two years... and letting
it disappear a week or two later. 

If they did save their RSS somewhere, then my query for more articles by the
same author would be very simple. I wouldn't need any fancy inferencing
engine or temporal reasoning, although these might help me find articles by
this author in other publications, and perhaps what his new favorite CD is
and what he had for breakfast this morning, although I'm less interested in
those.  

I suggest this use case to show that triples with string value objects can
still be very useful in a straightforward, low-hanging-fruit kind of way, if
organizations that generated RSS archived it with persistent URLs so that
people could build a web of connections around it. Since most don't, I
wondered how such transient data can play any role in any web of
accumulating connections.

It's great to hear from Tony H that Nature saves their RSS, and Kendall
Clark told me that MonkeyBrains saves theirs at
http://www.monkeyfist.com/RSS/1.0-jumbo/.

Bob

Received on Thursday, 26 August 2004 13:36:28 UTC