RE: EARL, RDF, Interesting Examples and PubSub.com

Update:
	PubSub.com now supports subscriptions to content which flows
over the NNTP network (Newsgroups), thus, as an alternative to
distributing RDF fragments by inserting them into weblogs and using
PubSub.com to collect them for you, you could now do the same with
NNTP. [1]
	Of course, distribution of RDF fragments over NNTP has a
number of interesting applications even without using the services of
PubSub.com. For instance, Sean McCullough's project to collect
information via RDF on the Texas Legislature could be easily
implemented by establishing an NNTP newsgroup explicitly designed to
accept posts of RDF statements from around the world. Sean, and anyone
else interested in the data, could then create an application that
uses NNTP to subscribe to the newsgroup and thus pick up any new RDF
statements that are published. This is, in essence, "topic-based
publish/subscribe" and everyone reading the "rdf.texas.legislature"
newsgroup would receive all RDF published over that "topic." Of
course, they wouldn't receive any RDF that made statements about the
legislators if it was published on some other newsgroup...
	A strength of PubSub.com's service is that it is able to
monitor *all* newsgroups (as well as blogs, etc.) and permits
"content-based" subscriptions rather than "topic-based" subscriptions.
Using a subscription to a particular "Referenced URI" at PubSub.com,
an application would be able to collect relevant RDF fragments
published on *any* newsgroup that is monitored by PubSub.com. This
might not be terribly important for a limited scope application like
building knowledge of the Texas State Legislature. However, it becomes
much more interesting when tracking information like annotations which
use the Annotea format or RDF that might be used to provide book
reviews, etc. These, more generally applicable RDF schemas, are more
likely to be published in a large number of newsgroups and would
benefit greatly from the ability to aggregate them together using a
content-based subscription that looks across all newsgroups.
	Has anyone already experimented with RDF distribution over the
NNTP network?

		bob wyman

[1] To see PubSub.com's support for NNTP, goto:
http://www.pubsub.com/nntp/ . To subscribe to "Referenced URI's" use
our advanced search page at: http://www.pubsub.com/nntp/advanced . See
also our announcement of the new service at:
http://www.pubsub.com/news/

Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 15:17:53 UTC