Registry in RSS

[Mike Fitzpatrick]

Along the same lines:  We've had a "usvao" Twitter feed running for a
while now that queries the US Registry hourly for updates/modified
entries.  The results are summarized in the allotted 140 chars to give
a sense of what new resource is available, but primarily this was done
to stake out the 'usvoa' Twitter for what we might do later.

While these (Twitter and RSS) are both nice to have without a specific
purpose, the IVOA AppsWG might want to consider how these could
be used:  e.g. could Portals be watching these to accrue new resources
locally?  Should ivorns be required for software to be used or do we assume
humans will follow a Tweet and be intrigued by the 'Red Giant' phrase
in the title and click a link to read the full resource description and then
query data via same Portal?  And for a bit of heresy:  Should/can a new
Tweet/Rss be used in the context of VOEvent (where 'event' is generalized
to something beyond the sky but is a type of 'VO' message)?

-Mike

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Markus Demleitner
<msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> Dear Registry folks,
>
> In the department "cheap ads" I've set up an RSS feed of what's new
> in the registry at http://vo.uni-hd.de/regrss .
>
> This is updated via an OAI query twice a day (6 am and 4 pm
> CET, actually).  Before going ahead with actually publishing and
> registering this, I'd appreciate some feedback from you.
>
> I have particular doubts about my half-assed HTML-based way of
> conveying a bit of key-value-fun.  Using, e.g., the author tag in RSS
> for creator.name is something I don't quite like; for one, the content
> of the author element is not displayed very prominently in many RSS
> UAs, whereas the typical astronomer looks at author(s) first (80% of
> ADS queries used to be author *only*), and for a second, I don't
> believe creator.name is a close match for RSS' author.
>
> So, I'm using HTML definition lists in the RSS description.  Ugly --
> but does it at least work well for you?  I'm using RSS categories for
> the subjects, on the other hand.  Is that a good idea?  Are there any
> UAs that actually do something with it?
>
> Any feedback welcome.
>
> Cheers,
>
>       Markus
>
>