PubMan Web Syndication Feeds
Motivation[edit]
Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a web site. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or "feed") of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by service providers that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.
In the PubMan context a range of syndications may be reasonable, e.g.:
- recent releases in repository (item versions)
- recent releases for a specific Organization Unit (item versions)
- recent changes for a specific publication
- each advanced search for the logged in user
- Question: Why restricting this functionality to logged in users? --Inga 14:41, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
- Workspaces: latest submissions or changes
Usage[edit]
WSD interface of the PubMan can be used
- by users directly with the browsers (FF, IE, Opera, etc.) which have already built-in plugins for WSD managing
- for automatized generation of the institutes web sites. See Feeding local webpages for more details.
- Question: What does WSD interface stands for? Web Syndication Data? --Inga 14:50, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Widespread formats[edit]
For the moment there are 2 main branches of formats of the Web Syndication Feeds: RSS and Atom.
- RSS can be divided into 2 sub branches: RSS 1.* and RSS 2.*. See here for features. Today, most feed readers and syndication tools supports both branches.
- Atom is relative new advanced WSD with many advantages. It has several backward compatible dialects.
Distribution: As of August 2008, the syndic8.com website was indexing 546,069 total feeds of which 86,496 were some dialect of Atom and 438,102 were some dialect of RSS, see feed summary. Following usage distribution of the RSS branches are taken from the Peachpit report from January 2007:
| RSS version | Usage |
| RSS 0.91 (RSS 2.* branch) | 13% |
| RSS 1.0 (RSS 1.* branch) | 17% |
| RSS 2.0 (RSS 2.* branch) | 67% |
Conclusion: It make sense to implement RSS 2.0 and Atom first. The Atom is the good candidate for implementation due to Google support and increasing usage for the moment. A later release may introduce support for RSS 1.* version if is explicitly requested by users
Implementation[edit]
- structuredexportmanager will include the implementation of the functionality taking WSDs as the new export formats, e.g RSS20, ATOM, etc. Thus SearchAndOutput interface will be able to deliver WSDs via REST.
- ROMA project can be used for the processing and generation of the wellformed WSDs.
Required:
- Mapping PubMan MD -> RSS/Atom
- Design changes in structuredexportmanager due to direct java bean implementation of the transformations
- Revise user interface to allow auto discovery of feeds (<link rel="alternate" [...]) on the corresponding web pages
- Identification of additional candidates for syndication