Excerpt from:  Think Outside the Feed
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December 30, 2003

RSS Adoption in Government

Governments have recently begun to understand the benefits that RSS provides. However, there are some significant hurdles that must be mastered.

There are many reasons why governments will adopt RSS and similar approaches to content dissemination and awareness.

"Selling government agencies on RSS would be easier if we could demonstrate to them an easy way to convert their existing news formats to automatically generated and delivered email newsletters." -- Ray Matthews

RSS to email newsletter formats is certainly one way to generate additional interest, but there are other issues that need to be addressed.

One of the basic difficulties that all governments face (indeed, all businesses) is the emerging requirement for semantically tagged content. Most government legacy systems are not easily refactord to produce XML content over HTTP. Furthermore, even the few that are able to do this have little or no capacity to provide a unified information model for discrete URL addresses for each information object. eGov initiatives must consider these issue if they are to build sustainable systems that deliver long-term benefits.

Providing infrastructure to clear these hurdles is an important step that will ultimately allow RSS (and other XML content formats) to thrive in government. The machinery required to do this has started to fall in place with the help of XML standards such as xHTML, XSLT, and SOAP. At MyST we regularly tackle this issue by using the MyST platform as an intermediate meta-data repository (i.e., a place where information objects can be easily represented as first-class items in a Web services environment). In so doing, all flavors of RSS are immediately available and XSLT is ready to meet other requires like RSS to email newsletter transformation.

Topic Tags:  
Syndication OptionsRSS (Rich Site Summary) Feed Atom Feed OPML (Outline Processor Language) Feed MYST-ML (MyST Markup Language) Content Feed MS-Office Smart Tag Subscription