Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Syndication and Harvesting with RSS, ATOM, OAI-PMH and Sitemaps

28. September 2007 um 12:32 Keine Kommentare

On my quest for metadata formats and APIs I found that ATOM is not just another RSS but more like a simple database language. Google’s Data API GData strongly pushes ATOM forward (but may also introduce some problems). Jim Downing wrote about ATOM, OAI-PMH, and Sitemaps – three different ways to provide a list of all the resources in a collection, and to incrementally discover changes. OAI-PMH is much less prominent, but why?

Andy Powell started a very lightening discussion with his talk at the JISC Digital repositories conference 2007. He complains that repositories are partly missing the web – popular we-could-also-call-them-repositories like Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Scribd etc. don’t use OAI-PMH nor does Google support it. Following the discussion I ask myself what the differences are between scholarly communication and people uploading and mixing any popular content. And do the differences justify different methods of syndication and harvesting? Have a look at the comments by Herbert van de Sompel and Erik Hetzner!