Sharing of resource databases using XML RSS

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

Dear all

I'd like to be able to use RSS as a format in which to return 
database search results. More specifically, I'd like to use some 
of the syndication possibilities of RSS to allow for groups 
maintaining similar content databases to exchange data. The 
generation of an RSS file must be in response to a database 
query so your database and/or CGI must be able to generate a 
RSS file.

I've put together a brief demonstrator of how I've got XML output 
from a couple of my databases for you to see what I'm on about.

http://medweb3.bham.ac.uk/databases/

I'm happy that's all working but I'm now at the stage when I'd like 
to link up with another server to try combined searches. Any 
takers?

My ultimate goal is to find someone with a database of some 
biomedical MCQs or images that we could attempt to link up 
behind an XML RPC search engine with our database(s) in 
Birmingham to demonstrate a multi-site resource discovery 
engine.

Failing that, I'd be grateful to hear from anyone interested in 
linking up any database. I've also got a medium-sized (around 
1000 HTML pages) web site index into a database that we can 
search. I've no idea about all this web site scraping, my 
database simply contains meta tags comprising keywords, page 
title and description. It makes an excellent RSS source, though, 
for this kind of experiment.

Cheers,

David.