Re: Amaya-like project for RSS?

Hi,

Danny Ayers wrote:
> Out in RSS land the line remains reasonably clear between those who
> appreciate the benefit of using RDF and those who don't. One of the
> problems is that as new vocabularies come available, even those that
> are specifically designed for use with RSS, there often isn't any
> visible advance in functionality. When things like partial
> understanding through inference are mentioned in this environment the
> response often includes the expression "smoking crack". But if there
> were a single (though presumably modular), figurehead app in which
> there was tangible evidence of utility, maybe people would be less
> concerned about the physical appearance of the interchange syntax...

I'm not the W3C, but I'm willing to give this a try :-) based on the 
Fenfire libraries [1], which, although far from complete, are finally 
nearing the point where you can build applications following the Fenfire 
vision. (It won't include the patented visualizations [2], though, since 
we're still sorting out the legal issues in case someone wants to sue us.)

Does anybody know an aggregator library for Java (LGPL-compatible, or at 
least GPL-compatible) that gets feeds from the Web and makes them 
available as RDF, no matter what RSS or Atom they are (but not stripping 
out additional RDF if the feed is RDF-based)?

If someone can help me with that part, I'll try to hack something usable 
(though not necessarily polished:)) next week. I imagine the first step 
would be just an ordinary baseline RSS viewer, then something that 
renders additional triples in some boring form (showing the 
property/value as text, using rdf:label if available), then allow 
developers to add additional views for special vocabularies and create 
e.g. a DOAP view, then make these easy to download&install. It should 
also be reasonably easy to allow the user to add semantic connections in 
addition to those downloaded from the Web.

The interesting part, of course, is in the connections; you're looking 
at a blog entry about an interesting project and you can look at a view 
with DOAP information about the project (linked by the blogger), which 
would also show other blog entries about that project (if linked by 
their bloggers), and then you could add your own relationships (e.g. to 
other projects with similar ideas).

Ok, that's enough pie-in-the-sky -- does someone know an aggregator/feed 
reader library like described above?

Thanks,
- Benja

[1] See http://fenfire.org/manuscripts/2004/hyperstructure/ for an 
unpublished article about the Fenfire vision. The project homepage, 
http://fenfire.org/, is a bit out-of-date at the moment.
[2] http://dannyayers.com/archives/2004/04/12/fenfire/

Received on Sunday, 28 November 2004 21:16:44 UTC