Categorisation, database searches and RSS format results

["David Davies" <d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk>]

As you know, I'm interested in being able to filter what items I 
pick up via RSS based on an as yet to be agreed extension to 
RSS, categories. For instance, if a channel publishes Macintosh 
news, I might want to only pick up items relating to networking 
and disregard those relating to games.

As I said yesterday in my introduction, I'm also interested in 
syndication as a means of resource discovery.

I have a number of resource databases that you might want to 
search. I could publish all the resources and new additions as 
an RSS file in the normal way, but that won't help you if you're 
only interested in a sub-section of what I have to offer.

I've written a CGI that searches such a database (medical 
images in this example) and returns the search results as an 
RSS file.

http://medweb2.bham.ac.uk/xml.rssSearchResults.fcgi?search

Replace 'search' with 'hypertensive', 'rash', or 'diabetic' 
keywords to find those resources in my database.

You can also query this CGI as an XML-RPC but not everyone 
will be able to do that so I made a simple HTTPSearchArgs CGI.

If you use Userland's excellent new Radio Userland, you can 
open this URL directly using File -> Open URL...

There's no reason why this XML-RPC can't search across 
multiple databases to give you a kind of search engine behind 
something like DMOZ that spits out results in a standard format.

I'm not quite sure how to take this on to the next stage, or which 
list to post this to. Is anyone interested in this or is it a
digression to the central syndication debate here?

Cheers,

David