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Re: [syndication] Category

Howdy,
The taxonomy module[1] in RSS 1.0 was created to address this very thing. It is still of status "Proposed," left that way for a bit at the time to let folks fiddle with it and see how it sat with them. I'm not sure why it's not moved forward. Perhaps it's just silently being used and that works for folks. Perhaps it proved overly/unnecessarily complex/large.
I've always maintained there's much value in simply specifying a category/subject path element. We're all rather used to them. They're self-descriptive, informative as to how one categorizes one's content, and simple as pie. We have XPATH, directory paths, URL-line paths, and Yahoo! directory paths. Why not RSS subject paths?
Now these paths could be fully qualified (indicating a subject-sphere in an established taxonomy)...
<dc:subject>http://dmoz.org/Home/Cooking/World_Cuisines/Asian/Indian/</dc: 
subject>
or ad-hoc (borrowing a page from a discussion between Dave Winer and Jon Udell eons ago -- sorry, but I can't seem to locate it at present)... 

  <dc:subject>/cooking/recipes/aromatic/indian</dc:subject>
The proposed advantage of the ad-hoc style is that it's non-restrictive so as to work with anyone's content management system or mindset and favours popularity of path-choices over standardization -- unused paths simply fade.
I must admit I've always been intrigued with the idea of a taxonomy server/cloud where one can search for and snatch a useful path from the pile and contribute one's own to the fray. Imagine DMOZ without the links; contributors are free to build a decent hierarchy unfettered by stale links, politics, cross-linking, and so on. I actually went so far as to write up a P2P IM-like app (can you say Jabber?) which would afford contributors a simple interface to searching, retrieving, contributing, cleanup (symlinks and the like) and voting on the contributions of others. If interesting to anyone, I could dig it up with pleasure.
All told, I'd love to see some forward movement across RSS implementations of something simple and agreeable like an RSS 0.9x <subject> / RSS 1.0 <dc:subject> attribute (this already exists in the RSS 1.0 Dublin Core module). 

Rael

[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-
dev/files/Modules/Proposed/mod_taxonomy-1-2.html

On Wednesday, November 21, 2001, at 12:32 AM, Julian Bond wrote:


We've been talking about Feed and Item categories on the Syndic8 list.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/message/678 and onwards.

The ideas are not finalized, but it's become apparent that there's a
real need to add some category information into the <channel> sections
of both 0.9x and 1.0 but also into OCS.

So what's the state of play in 0.93, 1.0 taxonomy module and further
development on OCS? Has the standards development process stalled? Or is
there a chance of moving it forwards?

--
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
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Rael

Rael Dornfest
Researcher
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
http://www.oreillynet.com/weblogs/rael/

"You know, Scully, hypertricosis does not connote lycanthropy."