RE: RSS data transience and the semantic web

Very interesting question...

>From my perspective, it's not the transience of the RSS data that reduces its usefulness (for the semantic web), but the lack of URIs.  The exciting part of the semantic 'web' (for me!) is the inter-relationships of data/values - whereas most RSS data contains largely string literals for the title/description, and no statements that contain purely URIs for all three parts of the statement (unless extending RSS with say Dublin Core).  This doesn't allow for much of a 'web' of data to be constructed (although RSS does demonstrate the usefulness of web metadata - maybe we can use it as a stepping stone to getting people to create richer metadata?).

Just my 2p.

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Dan Zambonini
Box UK
Internet Development and Consultancy

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-----Original Message-----
From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)
Sent: 25 August 2004 19:21
To: 'www-rdf-interest@w3.org'
Subject: RSS data transience and the semantic web

What role can RSS 1.0 play in the semantic web considering the transience of the data? Most data in RSS files today won't be there a month from now, as the files get updated until today's items fall off the list. Can any connections that would be useful for a web of information get built from such data? 
 
It would seem sensible for sites to offer archives of their own RSS feeds, but I don't know of any that do. (I tried searching for a few at archive.org, and it never had more than 6 per year for any feed. A surprising amount of the ones I tried couldn't be stored there because of a robots.txt exclusion.) Is the application developer expected to archive all data harvested from crawls? Does anyone know of any applications that are doing this with RSS data? 
 
Or do we just consider RSS 1.0 to be an RDF application that's independent of the semantic web? 
 
just curious,
 
Bob DuCharme   www.snee.com/bob       <bob@  
snee.com> weblog on linking-related topics: 
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1191

Received on Thursday, 26 August 2004 08:26:25 UTC