Re: "Role of RSS in Science Publishing"

[Ben Lund <b.lund@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Sayre wrote:
> Ben Lund wrote:
>
> > That depends entirely on the application you have in mind.  For end- 
> > aggregators, it's mostly fine that they can ignore things they don't 
> > understand.  But what about aggregating intermediaries?  Unless 
> > there's a defined extensibility model, there's a large chance that the 
> > extra data in the exensions that the aggregator doesn't understand 
> > will be lost.  RDF in RSS 1.0 make this a very simple problem to 
> > solve, whereas arbitrary XML namespaces makes it fiendishly difficult.
>
>
> Could you show us an example? I'm having a hard time understanding why 
> the intermediary could pass on blobs of (X)HTML but not blobs of XML.

Sure (but bear in mind that I said it would be fiendishly difficult, not 
impossible):

I'm thinking of two use cases here:

1) Aggregating information where two different trusted sources both 
publish data about the same item.  For example, a feed from a science 
publisher that gave the bibliographic metadata, and a feed from a 
citation indexer gave 'cited by' information.  How does the intermediary 
concatenate the two blobs of XML?  Remember, I'm talking about 
situations where the intermediary doesn't understand the namespace being 
used, so from the point of view of the aggregator, the two blobs look 
like this:

<entry>
  <id>http://www.example.com/item1</id>
  <title>Blah blah</title>
  ...
  <xyz:tag1>gfdgfdgfd</xyz:tag1>
  <abc:tag2>
   <xyz:tag3>gfdgfd</xyz:tag3>
   <xyz:tag3>65454343</xyz:tag3>
  </abc:tag2>
</entry>

and

<entry>
  <id>http://www.example.com/item1</id>
  <title>Blah blah</title>
  ...
  <xyz:tag4>gfdgfd</xyz:tag4>
  <xyz:tag4>bvcbvvcbvc</xyz:tag4>
  <xyz:tag4>ytytryrt</xyz:tag4>
  <xyz:tag4>6768875</xyz:tag4>
</entry>

There's no easy way of working out how to combine this information. 
However, with RDF, you can just concatenate the triples.

2) Aggregating feeds from different sources, and then allowing new feeds 
to be generated based on queries to arbitrary fields.
This means that the aggregator has to capture any incoming data in some 
sort of schema.  In my experience its easier to do that if that incoming 
data already has a data model more contrained than the XML hierarchical 
model.

> I also don't understand why including rdf:RDF in atom:entry is 
> insufficient. You'd have to consume it with an RDF parser and it would 
> come in a container that isn't RDF itself, but I don't see a problem. 

My view is that the RDF model buys you everything you need at the moment 
for an extensibility model -- that's why we use RSS 1.0 currently.  So, 
I don't particularly have a problem with the approach of putting rdf:RDF 
in an atom:entry. But that does beg the question of why Atom needs two 
separate data models.

Ta,
Ben



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