Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Benet Devereux <benet@cs.toronto.edu>]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Edd Dumbill wrote:

> So, RSS is "site summary". If you choose to syndicate that metadata,
> cool. There are many other things one could do with it.
> 
> In my opinion RSS and syndication should be separated. Syndication is
> about routing, rights, scheduling etc. That applies to any content,
> whether metadata, images, MP3s or whatever.
> 
> I don't think discussions conflating the two ideas of metadata and
> syndication will ever reach a happy resolution.
> 
> -- Edd

I completely agree about the separation of concerns. However, it seems
to me that metadata and syndication are not *completely* orthogonal,
at least from a subscriber/aggregator's point of view (although they may
be from a publisher's). A subscriber or aggregator selects the syndicated
resources he/she/it wants to retrieve on the basis of metadata, either
manually or with filters.

So although we certainly shouldn't conflate them into a single issue,
it makes some sense to at least discuss them together.

On the other hand, I can imagine a case for a "lightweight" syndication
app with no filtering, and for that, one would benefit by not having to
deal with metadata. My intuition is that this would be an unusual case,
but perhaps it's more common than I imagine.

> PS. As for RDF, it's one way of skinning the cat, and quite a funky one
> at that.  Why not let's try it and see how it goes?

Agreed also! It has great potential. The thing we want to avoid (and wiser
heads than mine have doubtless pointed this out many times) is
concentrating on the tool, not the problem to be solved.

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B. Devereux
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto
benet@cs.toronto.edu
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