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GCN Home > 11/22/04 issue

Feed the Network

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Agencies catch on to popular Web services standard

The Defense Department was on to something when it came across a new way to send out press releases and contract announcements—an Extensible Markup Language flavor called RSS.

The Census Bureau also uses RSS to publish links to its surveys, and the National Weather Service is trying out RSS to disseminate weather reports and alerts.

No surprise, really. RSS has been wildly popular within the Internet community for a few years, particularly among periodical publishers and the weblog community. But now, agencies are discovering that RSS can be a low-cost, low-hassle way of getting information out to a variety of audiences.

Developed by Netscape Communications Corp., RSS was originally known as Rich Site Summary. It now stands for Really Simple Syndication, but no one calls it anything other than RSS. Webmasters have used it to alert Internet surfers and other Web sites to news stories, weblog entries or other recently posted items.

“News feeds are applicable for any content that is updated frequently, like news releases, weather reports, product announcements, some data items and schedule information,” said Lisa Wolfisch, a computer specialist at the Census Bureau. Wolfisch recently gave an introductory talk on RSS at the Collaborative Expedition Workshop, held by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the Federal CIO Council’s XML Working Group.

The Census Bureau, which already uses RSS to alert users about surveys, will start offering its own news service, the Census Product Update, via RSS. Now, users interested in updates from the Census Bureau have to subscribe to a mailing list or visit its Web page.

Perhaps more importantly, RSS gives agencies an easy entry into the still-emerging world of service-oriented architectures. “In this sense, news feeds are a very basic form of Web service,” Wolfisch said.

RSS “allowed us to explore XML-type services,” said Robert Bunge, Internet dissemination expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is testing the technology.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Defense IT, IT in Action, Storage Management