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RSS 1.0 and its taxonomy module: bringing metadata back into RSS

(Eric van der Vlist, DYOMEDEA)

"RSS ("RDF Site Summary") is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization."

RSS 0.9 was introduced in 1999 by Netscape and has been one of the first RDF vocabularies to be widely adopted. This format has rapidly given birth to RSS 0.91 introducing many application specific features but losing its RDF nature.

RSS 1.0 is a proposal to come back to RSS roots --by reintroducing RDF-- and to define a namespace based modular structure. The proposed modules include modules to embed metadata using the Dublin Core syntax.

Amongst the other points to highlight: the attempt to keep a coherent dual view on the object models for both XML and RDF parsers and an experimental implementation of a taxonomy module assigning RDF resources to DC subjects.