RSS: Really Simple Syndication A Publisher’s Perspective Howard Ratner NISO Metadata Conference 20 May 2004

Overview Usage Drivers RSS Urchin

Active Usage Drivers Active inbound linking CrossRef, PubMed, Web of Science, ChemPort alerts ToC, subject specific, special offers Advance Online Publication Press Releases / Press Site Advertising Banner, skyscraper, mini online ads

Passive Usage Drivers Passive Inbound linking DOIs & urls in print OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative) Searching Metadata and full text searches STM specific and general searches RSS feeds Place hooks to the content in the places where a user is most likely to find it in their daily workflow.

Overview Usage Drivers RSS Urchin

What is RSS? A ‘machine-readable web page’ A lightweight XML format for syndicating news titles, links and descriptions Originally developed by Netscape, more recently adopted by bloggers Consumed by: Users with desktop readers Webmasters who want to embed titles from other sites in their own pages News aggregators

Different versions of RSS “Atom” 1.0 Simple: Plain XML Extensible: RDF/XML = most popular formats

Example of an RSS feed BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition Updated every minute of every day en-gb Tue, 16 Sep 03 09:21:32 GMT Copyright: (C) British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC News Hutton witnesses face tough questions Witnesses at the inquiry into Dr David Kelly's death will face cross-examination, a day after a BBC boss and a spy chief gave evidence. Deadly blast ends Japan siege At least three people are killed in an explosion in an office where a disgruntled worker had taken hostages. …

Example of an RSS feed

Current NPG RSS Feeds Nature Science Update Nature Materials Update Nature Signaling Update NatureJobs editorial NatureJobs jobs British Dental Journal TOC Other TOCs coming soon… All in RSS 1.0 format

RSS Highlights Publishers: Sends more people to your content Greater range of potential uses than embedding in third-party web pages Readers: Allows greater control than Can be easily aggregated and filtered to create custom feeds

Usage Drivers RSS Urchin Overview

Urchin A software framework for aggregating, filtering and displaying information from RSS news feeds Conceived and designed by NPG New Technology, funded by JISC Core code released as open source and available from: (v0.9)

Urchin architecture Urchin database General news feeds (BBC, NYT, Yahoo!, …) Scientific news feeds (NPG, Science Daily, Medscape, …) Local NPG content and databases Information ‘scraped’ from selected web pages ‘Breaking news’ alerts Keyword-specific RSS feeds Personalised news pages Subject-specific news

General Science home page

Filtered General Science home page

Ways to filter Urchin output Boolean keyword queries: Easy and intuitive but limited to preset fields Full RDF querying: More involved but allows filtering on any metadata Breaking news (experimental): Automatic identification of recently popular phrases

AGGREGATE bbc Microsoft AND (security OR virus OR worm)

Select ?item From ?item->nj:advertises{?job} Where ?job->nj:city = 'Cambridge'

Select ?article From ?article->dc:creator{?author}, Where ?item->dc:creator{?author} And $item->rss:link = '

Recommendations Maximize inbound links Spread linking hooks as wide as practical and as targeted as possible Partner with A&I services Partner with Search Engines Explore new technologies Experiment with new business models

Thank you! Contact information: Howard Ratner Good Resource: RSS: A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers by M Moffatt