RSS is a really cool standard, and one that I think can have some far-reaching usefulness at our university. Now I realize that its just xml, and that of course a lot can be done with xml. But the reason I’m hot on RSS specifically is that its a widely used standard, with many tools available, in many places, to utilize these feeds. I recently sent an email to our web services group, proposing this idea of utilizing RSS as a way to readily access information locked in our databases. The text of that email is below. I’m happy to say that I received an enthusiastic response from the one person I sent it to. I’ll be putting together some example/proof-of-concept stuff over the next month. Watch for the new category, RSS explorations.
12/7/2007 email: I’m starting to see some exciting possiblilties with xml content delivery from databases, which I’d like to share with you.If the university started to offer xml feeds in one of the standard RSS formats — rss2.0 or atom — from our standard databases we’d open up some really exciting possibilities. In my department we’re working to pull event data from the ticketing system and display it on the theater home page. In conceiving how we’d do this I’m struck by how easy it is for visual designers to utilize xml feeds in their web designs. There are some standard atom/javascript libraries that make this relatively easy, including some very nice tools in the latest Dreamweaver, CS3. There are also all kinds of plug-ins and other apps for services like FaceBook, MySpace as well as stand-alone products that can handle RSS feeds.
In our specific case I realized that if we build a standard-format xml feed from the ticketing system, with appropriate switches to filter the content, it would not only be readily displayed on the theater web site, but could easily be utilized by the other departments using the same system. And then thinking more broadly it would be a cinch for the public affairs office to add this info to their website, or for an school-wide Arts@… page. And why couldn’t an external ArtsNewHaven site also be pulling this feed? Or a drama student pull it into their MySpace page? Once you’ve got the data feed created, particularly utilizing an existing standard, all kinds of possibilities open up.
But wait — why not have an xml feed from the Student Information Systems database? They’ve got course data in there that I’d love to be able to pull into the school web page. And I bet students would like to be able to access that from their mobile phones — with RSS its easy to set that up. How about an xml feed from the On line Directory — then I could have a staff contact page on the Drama site that pulls right from there –no more maintaining my own list, a duplication of effort. How about an emergency-notice xml feed? Incorporate a function on all the university web pages that would insert this if there was an emergency announced. I bet many staff could make good use of an RSS feed from the STARS employment database. Sakai and the our portal support RSS right? With this type of service broadly utilized professors and staff can easily have their own custom pages with automatically updated info. And they don’t need to pull the data manually, format it and post it to their pages, and then constantly maintain it.
How this feed gets generated would differ in all cases. But in a black-box approach, as the web page visual designer, I don’t really care how its created. All I need to know is that any of the feeds match one of the existing standards. With this concept conceived as an overall approach for the university, the requirement could start to be built into new projects, and added to maintenance plans for existing ones.
So if you’re looking for big ideas, here you go. Separate the data delivery from the presentation — save a lot of duplicate data entry/maintainance — make it a standard across all univeristy systems — and then step back and see how creative our community can really be. I think we won’t be disappointed.
Thanks for listening!
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RodeWorks » RSS coming of age on Jan 08 08 at 9:23 am[...] a park, a school — that you want to be near. I’ve grown to appreciate that RSS provides a lot of interesting possibilities and the more sites and data sources that provide a feed, the more interesting possibilities open [...]
RodeWorks » Blog Archive » Open data yields big benefits on Dec 08 09 at 6:19 am[...] more of the latter than the former. Technology isn’t the problem here — making data should not require a lot of technical work. What it takes is a committment to the process, and trust in the benefits of openness over the [...]
Bill Fitzgerald added these pithy words on Dec 14 07 at 3:50 amInteresting post — we’ve been working on some similar/related ideas, and have a proof of concept up here: http://feeds.openacademic.org
All built from freely available open source components — it does the (re)publishing you describe, and in turn generates rss feeds of the content to allow for remixing.
Cheers,
Bill
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