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RSS/RDF: What the future may hold

I recently read a bunch of predictions on what RSS can do/will do in the near future to information- how we find it, and how we consume it.

Steve Gillmor in his article predicts that in 2004, RSS information routers will have the following features:

• Persistent storage of XHTML full-text/graphics/audio/video of RSS feeds
• XPATH search across local and Net stores
• Self-forming and reordering subscriptions lists based on the aggregated priorities of user-chosen domain experts
• Use of IM notification for post notification to aggregate affinity groups and active conversations
• Integration of Hydra-like collaborative tools for multi-author conference transcripts
• Videoconferencing routing and broadcast/recording tools
• Integration of speech recognition and real-time indexing to allow quoting of linear audio and video streams
• Mesh networked peer-to-peer synchronization engine for item propagation across shared spaces on multiple clients, including phones; iPods; and eventually Longhorn PDAs (circa 2006).

He goes on further to predict new applications that will emerge:

• Metadata-driven directories that dynamically create RSS feeds based on affinity
• Virtual conferences
• IM/RSS presence networks for rich collaboration and e-mail replacement
• Content-generation tools based on small, routable XHTML objects
• A DRM network with enough creative and hardware support to blunt the Microsoft/RIAA DRM threat to peer-to-peer port hijacking.

Its almost the middle of 2004 now, and I dont see any of this happening yet, but that is not to say that it wont happen.

Another area where there a big opportunity for RSS/RDF is Knowledge management. Knowledge management is an significant problem in an organization. Valuable content is hidden away in individual silos- be they mail folders, group websites, CVS repositories, Shared directories or databases. What is needed is some what to mark up this content with metadata, some way to search for this content, and some way to consume it.

The first part of the problem- rich, interoperable metadata- is hard enough. RDF is the mechanism that the RSS uses to keep metadata about news items. RSS uses RDF to provide it a simple Ontology system (Ontology is a way of classifying something, such as in a hierarchy, and being able to infer a relationship with other things) for web resources. So you can describe an item using Title, author, subject, date published, keywords etc. However, RDF is far more capable than that, and can be used to describe more complex things too, such as Gene Ontologies.

You still have a problem of how to mark up data (an automatic classification v/s someone adding metadata manually), how to have a uniform way of classifying things within an organization, or across it; but that is a problem for these people to address! A nice, but slightly dated, discussion on Ontologies and Metadata can be found here.

However, once we do get data marked up, RSS is an excellent foundation to build on for technologies on how to consume it.

Posted by vivek at May 3, 2004 04:24 PM | TrackBack