Wrong level to munge at
Danny Ayers is talking about getting a unified whole out of RSS/RDF, RSS 0.x/2.x, and Atom. To my mind, he's looking at this at the wrong level - the XML level:
I was just wondering how best to munge data from RSS x.x, RSS 1.0 and Atom. Sure, transforming everything into RSS 1.0 + the odd new term might work, but seems a little messy, strained. There are (potential) equivalences that could be specified properly between DC, RSS 1.0 and Atom/OWL), but that still seems a little limited. That's ignoring the RSS x.x stuff. But it just occurred to me that if a fresh ontology was created, it would be possible to have things like:
rss:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
rss2:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
atom:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
dc:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
This is the wrong place to work for that. What you want is to get a set of domain objects - you can work with those in a unified fashion. At the XML level, it's going to be a complete nightmare...
Comments
[patent_munger] July 19, 2004 0:07:55.544
I think I agree with that comment (assuming I understand it). I had a similar problem to this...
I had to display data in a web page and the data source was one of 3 different but similar XML file formats. The underlying data was more or less the same (most fields were common to all formats but some had custom fields of their own and some dealt with the data slightly differently). My solution was to parse the different XML files into a common data structure (I'm talking Perl here), then do some post munging & data checking on the data structure, before sending it on to a HTML template (template toolkit) for displaying. I've since had to incorporate newer versions of the XML formats and it was a breeze - took all of 15 minutes work (excluding testing).