This is an article I’ve submitted to Computerworld NZ. I interviewed Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit for this. Note that the target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry’s experiences in E-Government I decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT. So here it is:
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RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other
regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online
publishing – The
New York Times and Reuters
are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS “feeds”. The New
Zealand Government
began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July
2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit
released a document entitled “A
standard for the publication of government news summaries”, which
outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed
the document’s author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand
E-Government Unit.
Publish/Subscribe Component
The document by Hendrikx proposed a 3-part RSS “component” for
e-government, made up of:
– RSS news feeds
– News Aggregation
– A Syndication/Subscribe service
This is known as ‘publish/subscribe’ on the Web and it is one component of
the New Zealand E-Government strategy.
The E-Government
Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the
Internet should be “the dominant means of enabling ready access to government
information, services and processes” by June 2004. Hendrikx views the publish/subscribe model as “one of a number of ways
of making information available” and confirms it is “one of our key
goals”. As to whether RSS is being used by the Government to distribute
information both to the public and internally, Hendrikx asserts that “this
model is equally useful for making information available for both public and
internal consumption.”
A Short History of RSS
The history of RSS
comprises a number of competing and at times conflicting versions. It’s also a
matter of contention as to who invented RSS. Netscape were the first to release
something called RSS – which at that time stood for “RDF Site Summary”
and was designed for use in portals.
It was labelled RSS 0.9 and came to light in March 1999. Netscape went on to
release RSS 0.91 in July that same year, re-christening it “Rich Site
Summary”. This version included features from Dave Winer’s
<scriptingNews> format.
In December 2000, RSS 1.0 was released by an independent group of developers
– it used RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax and focused on modularity
and extensibility. It had more in common with RSS 0.90 than RSS 0.91, which was
one of the reasons the RSS world forked off into two different directions. Soon
after Dave Winer released RSS 0.92, which was a simpler version of RSS that
built on RSS 0.91. The most popular version of RSS today is RSS 2.0, which was
released by Dave Winer’s company Userland in September 2002.
E-Government selects RSS 1.0
When the New Zealand E-Government Unit came around to selecting which RSS
format they would use at the end of 2002, they opted for RSS 1.0. Hendrikx
explains how they came to that decision:
“We started researching news syndication in late
2002. It was clear to us that we needed an extensible way to add new information
to our RSS feeds. The early RSS standards (0.9x) were not extensible. RSS 1.0
was chosen mostly because of its standards based approach and the use of XML
namespaces. The fit of RSS 1.0 with DC (Dublin Core) also helped our
decision.”
In their implementation, the New Zealand E-Government Unit added the Dublin
Core-based New
Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) metadata component, for
government specific information. The NZGLS metadata standard is the official New
Zealand Government standard for metadata. For example one of the NZGLS tags, <nzgls:type.agency>,
specifies the Government agency for each item in the RSS feed.
Currently the New Zealand E-Government has about 20 agencies generating RSS
feeds. These are collected and aggregated into two public RSS feeds, which can be found
at http://news.portal.govt.nz/.
Hendrikx says that “these two feeds differ only by the geographic cover of
the content: one contains only country wide news, the other contains all news
including regional.”
Aggregation and Syndication
The document published in July 2003 focused on the first part of the
e-government RSS component,
RSS feeds. The next parts, aggregation and syndication, are actually in
deployment already says Hendrikx.
“An aggregator was successfully prototyped last year. A production
version is now running and produces the two RSS feeds mentioned previously. The
output from the aggregator also drives the news content on the Govt.NZ portal
(http://www.govt.nz/).”
Hendrikx says that details of the aggregation and syndication features will
be published on the E-government site “at an appropriate time to link with
upgrades to the portal”.
Bringing RSS to The People
In the commercial world,
RSS and syndication technologies are familiar to only a small percentage of people.
Mainstream IT people have yet to buy into the Publish/Subscribe vision, so there
is a need to educate people and evangalise the benefits of publishing in RSS.
Hendrikx says that this is true of government agencies too.
“The concept and its benefits are not always immediately obvious and so
we’ve spent time talking to agencies. Some agencies with the in-house technical
capability were quick to adopt the system. Other agencies have joined up on a
gradual basis as they developed an understanding of the benefits. One agency
produced a forms-based client for us to help the smaller agencies generate their
RSS content. In the longer term we may roll out a push based technology that
allows interested agencies to push their RSS content to our server rather than
having to publish RSS on their websites.”
The E-Government is one of the early adopters of RSS in New Zealand.
Non-government organisations are now starting to consider implementing RSS and
syndication technologies too. Hendrikx advises “the advantage of RSS is
that it makes content widely available. RSS is fairly easy to implement, as
there are plenty of tools available to help you.”
Commercial companies might not need the metadata rich feeds that RSS 1.0
enables. It’s even easier to use RSS 2.0 to publish news and other regularly
updated information. Companies may even want to consider engaging their
customers in conversations, by publishing weblogs with RSS feeds. But whichever
form of RSS you use, one thing’s for sure – the
world of RSS and syndication is re-defining how information is published and
read on the Web.
