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Where Are The RDFs?

Posted by Cliff on from the i-wanna-centralized-repository dept.

zignig asks: "Sites have been publishing RDF's for a while (how many slashboxes are there now?). However I'm interested in knowing what sites put out RDF information. Is there a page or repository for currently available RDF feeds? If this information doesn't exist, then how can one find if a site has an RDF feed? It would be a good, low band width solution for Web news."

13 comments

  1. userland by eth0 · · Score: 1

    userland has good example

    1. Re:userland by dingbat_hp · · Score: 1

      No, Userland has a poor and bastardised example (and that was before the Nameless Slithering Horror that it 0.92)

      RDF isn't RSS, and Userland's RSS doesn't have any RDF left in it at all.

  2. Pardon my naiveness... by JediTrainer · · Score: 1

    Sorry for the lame question, but for the uninitiated, what is an RDF?

    --

    You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
    1. Re:Pardon my naiveness... by aelvin · · Score: 2

      RDF is the Resource Description Framework, a W3C recommendation for making web content understandable by machines. Slashdot's own RDF is here. Cool, huh?!

  3. Some RDF news feeds by Charles+Maurice · · Score: 2

    As far as I know, it is not possible to know whether a site provides an RDF feed unless it is either driven by Slashcode (where the feed is provided at http://www.website.org/website.rdf as in the case of Slashdot) or Manila (where the RDF-like RSS feed is available from http://website.com/xml/rss.xml). xmltree.com is a good directory of various news feed formats, and there is an excellent weblog which is a Manila site, and so has an RSS feed here. While I'm sure some other content management systems provide feeds, I'm not aware of the default addresses for them.

  4. RSS!!! by Matts · · Score: 3

    I get so frustrated with this error...

    The XML lingo you are looking for is RSS, which in the 0.9 format from Netscape was a form of RDF, then UserLand software decided to bastardise it into "Rich Site Summary", removing the RDFness. This is the most common format available now - RSS 0.91 (they've recently released 0.92). Luckily some very smart XML geeks saw this was a bad thing, and took RSS under their wings to create RSS 1.0, which *is* a form of RDF again.

    But please, do not call RSS files "RDF". There are many forms that RDF can take. RDF is just a directed graph syntax in XML - its possibilities are endless and not limited to headline summaries. You are doing yourself an injustice by calling RSS "RDF", because I could not feed you my geneology graph in RDF format and expect you to be able to make headlines out of it.

    You want RSS feeds, which you can find at http://www.xmltree.com/

    Thank you and goodnight :-)

    --

    Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
  5. sites dont update RDFs... by Helix150 · · Score: 1

    My problem is that many sites post RDFs and then ignore them. End result being you get a nice website with todays news and a nice RDF with news that became outdated last year.

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    --IronHelix
    1. Re:sites dont update RDFs... by Xunker · · Score: 1

      Are you sure? Generally, for 'blogs especially, it's automatic. For my site, my software updates the RDF every time an article is added, removed or modified.

      The only time you'd see a not up to date backend would be if they're managing their site by HAND -- just modifying an HTML page. I don't think many sites do that. At least, I HOPE not.

      --
      Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
  6. I update qmail.org automagically by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 2

    When I add anything to qmail.org, I put a "NEW" or "UPDATED" image on it along with a datestamp. I've got a script that grovels through the page and sucks out anything with a datestamp. Then I sort them and write them into new.html. I use a similar script to write news.rdf. So as long as I'm careful to add the datestamp, I'm covered on both sides.
    -russ

    --
    Don't piss off The Angry Economist
    1. Re:I update qmail.org automagically by Hallow · · Score: 1

      Jeez that's doing it the hard way.
      Ever heard of SQL?

      You can even do automagic timestamps on new entries, write yourself a little php admin frontend.

      Setup a cron job to automagically rewrite your new.html and news.rdf pages, sucking the data
      and generating the pages through any number of languages that have SQL support.

    2. Re:I update qmail.org automagically by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 2

      Yeah, but *I* have hair on my chest.
      -russ

      --
      Don't piss off The Angry Economist
  7. Slashcode.org by The+Unconquered+One · · Score: 1

    Slash automatically provides RSS for free. At http://slashcode.com/sites.shtml you'll find a list of nearly all sites that use Slash.

    --
    It's not cool to use other peoples code... -
  8. more over.... by stuart_farnan · · Score: 1

    try http://www.moreover.com they provide news feeds for several sites.