xmlTree

["james@xmlTree.com" <james@xxxxxxx.xxxx]

Dear Syndication List members,

I have opened up xmlTree's weblogs and news channels to the outside world in a machine
readable format (OCS) at http://www.xmltree.com/export/ocs.cfm.  This is a complete list -
some of the channels listed were entered by me after contacting channel content providers,
some by the providers themselves, and some from My.Userland and RssMaker (both after
contacting the respective owners).

What does xmlTree add?  Only keywords and categorisation (using Dewey).  A sample entry
looks like:

<rdf:description about="http://www.betanews.com/";>
    <dc:title>Beta News</dc:title>
    <dc:creator>BetaNews</dc:creator>
    <dc:description>Beta News</dc:description>
    <dc:subject>
        <rdf:Description>
            <dcq:subjectScheme>DDC Local</dcq:subjectScheme>
            <rdf:value>005.1</rdf:value>
        </rdf:Description>
    </dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>beta, betanews, daily, e-zine, headlines, news, software,
world</dc:subject>
    <rdf:description about="http://betanews.com/mnn.php3";>
        <ocs:language>en</ocs:language>
        <ocs:format>http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/</ocs:format>
    </rdf:description>
</rdf:description>

There was some negative feedback about using Dewey on Dave Winer's discuss.userland.com
site at http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$8578,
but I think that the alternative suggested (Library of Congress) does not offer as
intuitive a scheme.  I'm agnostic about my selection of categorisation, however, and will
change if someone can show that an alternative is as rigorous, updated frequently so that
new topics are better covered, is extensible (so that xxx is a superset of xxxx) etc etc.
I agree that this type of categorisation should not be the only one, which is why I also
include keywords (see http://www.xmltree.com/metadata/search.cfm) for an example keyword
search tool.

The URL used (export/ocs.cfm) will change in the not too distant future - I plan to add a
XML-RPC interface to the site so that I can serve up the entire contents in machine
readable form using a single URL.  I will also be allowing the requester to specify
subsets of this list, by keyword and / Dewey code, by schema (RSS, ScriptingNews etc), and
also sets of channels other than weblogs/news which will be added to xmlTree soon.

As always, all feedback welcomed.

Best regards,
James Carlyle

james@xmltree.com
Wavefront Limited
70 Acton Street London WC1X 9NB
UK (44) 171 813 0665
www.xmltree.com - directory of XML content on the web