[Zope] importance/uses of rdf/rss ?

chas panda@skinnyhippo.com
Wed, 06 Oct 1999 13:52:57 +0800


One of the surprising things when I asked for feature
requests for notmail (or basically webmail) was that 
almost everyone mentioned rdf and rss (usually giving 
mynetscape as an example). I hadn't realised it was 
used so widespread and wondered what I was missing - so, 
I went to refresh my understanding of RDF :

http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/djb1/research/metadata/rdf.shtml

(warning - folloing the links on this site will give you a 
 nosebleed from information overload.. it's a monster.)

which was all well and good. But how does this apply to
the way that us (zopesters) can use it ?

For something like Km|News, I can see that we might use content 
from other sites (such as PalmPower - this is a good example :
http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199907/ppeditorial0799001.html )
or in turn we might want people to syndicate our own content.

And applying this to the webmail, I guess we could have custom
news delivered to our inbox using an rdf-based news channel. Right ?

But some of the discussions on this list have hinted at RDF being
much more deeply intertwined with Zope and ZODB. How else might
you use RDF and are people using just straight XML tools ?

Cheers,

chas