D-Lib magazine in their December 2004 issue carry an interesting story about
Nature's use and plans for using RSS. The article is entitled: "The Role of
RSS in Science Publishing".
In the article[1] the folk from Nature say:
"As a science publisher, however, we are minded to continue to produce RSS
1.0 for the immediate future, since it meets all our current needs, while
monitoring the Atom development to see what end utility it might afford. Our
current view is that Atom does not provide the necessary level of metadata
extensibility and interoperability that we are able to achieve with RSS
1.0."
...
"One of our main interests in RSS is the ability to include additional
metadata."
"Besides tables of content with associated bibliographic metadata, we also
syndicate feeds of the current jobs advertisements that are held in our
scientific jobs database."
"But RSS is not just for syndicating textual information; it is also being
used to transmit complete scientific data sets."
" The latest version of Urchin [Nature Publishing Group's RSS Aggregator]
released to SourceForge supports filtering by channel aggregates, keywords,
specific data fields and Boolean queries. It further supports full RDF
queries using RCQL (the RDF::Core::Query language)." So, we have an RSS
Aggregator with RDF Query built in!
Clearly, the folk at Nature see RSS/Atom as much more than formats for
carrying simple text-oriented blog entries. They are talking here of
structured job postings, scientific data sets, etc. This is, I think, the
*real* future of Atom -- as a generic format for feeds of data that will
become more and more structured over time. Today, content is almost always
"text". In the future, I think we'll see the "xml" content type become
dominant.
Will Nature be using RSS V1.0 or Atom in the future? If we don't finish Atom
and get the extensibility questions resolved, it is certain that they will
stick to RSS V1.0.
bob wyman
[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html
