Introduction and initial thoughts

["David Davies" <d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk>]

Hi. I've just joined this list and clearly have a lot of catching up
to do. I'm working my way though the list archives but with >600 
messages please excuse me if I say anything that's been well 
covered in the past. I'm also trying to work my way through 
related documentation and web sites listing syndication issues, 
RSS formats, etc.

I'm interested in syndication from the perspective of resource 
discovery. I've been interested in the archives that I've read so far 
about classification and categorisation. My take on this is that I 
would like to see some kind of category tag in RSS files so that 
my aggregator can allow users (in my case students, I teach 
medicine for a day job) to either browse RSS channels by 
subject or search effectively by pre-defined keywords. Free-text 
searches are OK of course but often don't generate the search 
results that formalised keyword systems or expert thesauri do.

My side interest in this is in making all the web-based teaching 
resources we have in our medical school available to all other 
medical schools, and vice versa (questions of copyright and 
property rights aside). But how would I know what your medical 
school has and by the same token, how would you know what 
we have? Something like syndication would seem a very 
sensible way of achieving this.

I guess I'm lucky as the field I work in has a well-established 
hierarchy of concept keywords that's pretty much globally 
accepted. This has allowed a number of sites to create 
meta-data databases of resources using these keyword terms. I 
guess a more generalised analogy would be the Dewey 
Decimal Classification system for general library resources. 

As an aside, my view is that the librarians and information 
professions have a lot they can teach us on classification as 
they've been doing this professionally for more than a century.

Anyhoo, although I'm very new to syndication and RSS and so far 
have only scratched the surface in terms of my understanding of 
what it can do, I'm very much looking forward to participating on 
this list.

Apart from making my $0.02 worth of contribution to the 
syndication debate, my personal interest is in using RSS or 
equivalent to feed my live aggregator of medical teaching 
resources. By live I mean it isn't generated once per hour or 
whatever, when a new resource becomes available it instantly 
appears in the aggregator. It has a HTML front-end backended 
by a simple relational database. An XML front end is available 
too giving me hope for some synergy with RSS. 

Thanks for listening.

Cheers,

David.