ILRT: Metadata Research: Misc Demos: RDF Channels

Rudolf: Channels

Mailing lists as RDF channels

This script currently provides and XML/RDF channel view of the mailbase archives. Currently the only formats supported are RSS 0.9 and the RSS 1.0 proposal.

Bugs

since we're scraping data from HTML pages, this is fragile
script uses lynx to retrieve pages instead of the LWP module

Examples

As a CGI script, it reads an argument 'listname' and attempts to generate XML/RDF describing recent threads this month. For other months, specify in YYYY-MM format, eg "list=opensource&month=2000-02". These examples show a few popular mailbase lists; you can try others by changing the demo URLs.

Download

Here's a snapshot. Not much to look at...

mailbase2rss10

Bookmarklet

A quick RSS channel viewer tip for those whose browsing environment supports Javascript Bookmarklets:

Create a toobar bookmarks entry whose URL is the Javascript below.

RSSViz channel visualisation:
javascript:location.href='http://rdfwebring.org/cgi-bin/rdfweb/rss2html.pl?uri='+location.href

RDFViz graph visualisation:
javascript:location.href='http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/cgi-bin/rdf-dot/uri2gif?URI='+location.href

Plans

This script shows how one site can easily be wrapped in RDF/XML to support automation and channel-like applications. While mailbase is only a single Web service, it supports a huge number of discussion lists. Similarly, the Hypermail and Mhonarc packages provide widely used software to support HTML views of archived mailing lists. By hacking RDF support into these and similar tools, it should be possible to reflect a fair number of mail archives into an RDF-based system. We can also access some mail archives via the IMAP protocol (and the Perl IMAP module.)

Recent Changes

Aug 2000: upgraded to support the RSS 1.0 proposal
I've added a 'current month' facility (thanks Libby :-)

danbri