mark nottingham

Semantic Syndication

Saturday, 3 May 2003

Web Feeds

Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a
Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module.

This approach is the most sensible for ANY application of Semantic Web technology (as I’ve argued before). Rather than foisting RDF’s ugly, unusable XML syntax on applications, map from a native XML format to RDF.

This gives you a number of advantages;

• the syntax is more natural and appropriate to the application
• the mapping to the semantics is more flexible; you can change it as your understanding of the data changes, without changing the data
• you get to leverage a LOT of existing data out there

Danny’s chosen to use XSLT; another approach is to adorn XML schemas with hints to extract statements from their instance documents.

This is a good move; I’m hoping that efforts like this will convince the RDF crowd that RSS deserves to live on its own, unencumbered by the growing pains of RDF, while still getting value from it.

P.S. what the heck does “predominantly public domain” mean?