Re: channel classification (was: Hello, I am Carmen)

["Carmen" <chv@xxxxxxxxx.xxxx]

Wow, I am honored. All these messages with my name in the Subject!

Surely we are not the first ones to try and solve this problem.
I'd like to hear more about James' plan to use the Dewey Decimal
system.

If you don't want to allow publishers to create new categories,
what if we have a nice handful of top-level categories and
then allow publishers to create sub-categories within those?
If we had, say, a general "news" category then it makes sense
to sub-divide it arbitrarily deep:

	news.business
	news.business.microsoft
	news.business.microsoft.win2K

This would be nice and organized but a particular article
might need several different tags to fully describe it.

Or we could use a keyword scheme. We can start with a reasonable
fixed list, let providers augment it with their own, and apply
social pressure to nudge noncomformists into line.

Carmen

Try Headline Viewer at http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Nottingham [mailto:mnot@pobox.com]
Sent: Saturday, July 03, 1999 5:37 PM
To: syndication@onelist.com
Subject: Re: [syndication] channel classification (was: Hello, I am
Carmen)


From: "Mark Nottingham" <mnot@pobox.com>

So the actual categories that the publisher can choose from, how does that
get decided? I don't think it's a good idea to allow channel publishers to
create new categories; that would be a mess. A centrally-managed list would
be idea, but probably impractical - do we want to give this a try?

Maybe another way to go about it is to allow the publisher to decide which
classification system they want to be considered part of. For instance:

<FooFormat>
<header>
...
<category
authority="http://bar.com/categorydefinition.xml";>Widgets/FrobNobs</category
>
...
</header>
<item>
...

This is nice and flexible, but may lead to problems; if an aggregator didn't
want to support too many categorization methods, or there was a lot of
overlap between categorisation schemes, there would be trouble.

Hopefully, selecting the channel from a large list at the aggregator will be
only one method of adding channels. Netscape had the right approach in
allowing channel publishers to put a 'subscribe to our channel' button on
their home page; the problem here of course is that the aggregator could
(and should) be anywhere. A simple cut-n-paste URL for the XML file will
probably have to suffice for this...


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