Re: Amaya-like project for RSS?

Danny Ayers wrote:
>>I'm not the W3C, but I'm willing to give this a try :-)
> 
> Cool!

:-)

>>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)?
> 
> I believe Raptor's got pretty wide coverage.

Looks really nice, but I'd really prefer not to depend on a native 
library. I want to be able to run on Windows without me having to touch 
it ;-) so I'd like to just make a runnable JAR that contains everything. 
So no C lib if I can avoid it ;)

...
> In Java there's the Rome toolkit which
> has the new I/O but is straight XML-based. It would give you objects
> from which the graph could be built (they were talking of possibly
> using my soup parser, but I haven't heard anything recently).

I don't think that's really useful -- after all, what we're really 
getting at here is that you can add any additional information to your 
feed (in RDF) and then the client can make use of it, even if it doesn't 
understand it completely -- if we have to implement a Rome "Module" for 
every extension, how're we going to show how cool RDF is?

Of course I could use Rome only to parse non-RDF/XML feeds -- but that 
isn't fun either.

...
> You can get a long way with Morten's feed -> RDF/XML XSLT, I used an
> early version of that in my IdeaGraph play. It now supports Atom too.

Cool. I just tried it out on Dave Winer's RSS 2.0 feed, and it just 
worked. And when you pass RSS 1.0 through it, it apparently doesn't 
touch it at all, so any additional RDF just goes through. And it's GPL. 
Sweet.

I think I'll use that as my starting point -- when reading a feed, 
always pass it through the XSLT before parsing it with a standard 
RDF/XML parser.

> John Cowan's TagSoup should make an excellent cleaner, but I think
> you'd have to create the 'profile' (or whatever he called the schemas)
> for RSS 2.0 etc.

No, no, I don't want to work on an RSS parser ;-)

> Absolutely. I did a flaky proof-of-concept with a graph-based display
> (in IdeaGraph) using a crude client  - it worked, but I got the
> impression a lot of work would be needed in the UI to make it
> friendly. But being able to generate RDF/XML blog posts with a single
> mouse gesture was pretty cool.

Ah, posting! Not the thing I'll start with, but definitely something 
you'd want, too! :-)

The idea of being able to post annotations you've made locally is neat.

I'm afraid I'll have to ask -- does someone know a Java library for blog 
*posting*? ;) ;)

- Benja

Received on Sunday, 28 November 2004 23:05:24 UTC