RSS Feeds Research Articles

A selective publication model for the web: the webograph approach

We believe that the most important architectural features for the next generation web publishing systems will certainly be a semantic classification and a selective access to information. As the web is becoming the leading publication channel, the publishing systems should allow publishers to more effectively control the access to the information to be presented to the readers. The current 'share with all or share with friends only' model is limited, even when the access is restricted with a password, and is far from the way people share information in real life: what is said in private is not always what is said in public and what is referred to as public can further be categorised. The webograph prototype presented in the paper explores a restrictive publishing model, called the 'iceberg visibility model', based on dynamic views defined on RSS feed classes and reader groups.

Your Personal Learning Network

Web 2.0 tools and resources can enhance our efficiency and effectiveness as music educators, supporting personal learning networks for ongoing professional growth and development. This article includes (a) an explanation of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the use of an RSS reader/aggregator; (b) a discussion of blogs, podcasts, wikis, folksonomies, and other resources that can be subscribed to via RSS, with examples of these media applicable to music teaching and learning highlighted; (c) a list of tools that allow one to search for RSS-enabled content of interest; and (d) instructions for accessing resources to create and develop blogs, podcasts, wikis, and folksonomies.

The use of electronic tools and the information highway to facilitate knowledge transfer in primary care

Access to information is essential to effective and efficient clinical practice. On one hand, clinicians must keep track of new scientific evidence relevant to their field of practice. On the other hand, encounters with patients generate questions requiring answers in order to provide adequate clinical care. The main challenge is to access truly useful information that is: 1) relevant to clinical practice, 2) scientifically valid, and 3) requires minimal efforts to find, to appraise and to decide to integrate or not into practice. [1] The Internet now allows both staying up-to-date and finding answers to clinical questions. Three main strategies can be used to take advantage of Internet resources: “push”, “pull” and “exchange.” The “push” strategy is similar to subscribing to a paper-based medical journal. The main purpose of this strategy is to keep aware of new knowledge relevant to practice. Many organizations offer to “push” clinical information to health care providers through Web portals (e.g.,, amc.ca, Journal Watch), e-mails alerts (e.g.,, InfoPratique, InfoPoem, evidenceupdates, Dynamed Weekly updates, GFD journal alerts, Pubmed) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) (e.g.,, RSS4medics). There is, however, a risk of being rapidly overloaded with useless information, either irrelevant to practice, invalid, and/or needing extensive work to appraise, if pushed information is not judiciously selected. Information can also be actively searched for (“pull” strategy), usually for the purpose of answering clinical questions. Most often, electronic tools offer a much faster and broader access to information than searching through piles of medical journals accumulating on shelves over the years. From databases of original studies (e.g., Medline, Embase) and systematic reviews (e.g., Cochrane Library) to virtual libraries (e.g., MD Consult, Stat!Ref), repositories of clinical practice guidelines (e.g., CMA Infobase, National Guideline Clearinghouse), critical summaries, synopsis of original articles (e.g., InfoCritique, ACP Journal Club, InfoPoem, Clinical Evidence) and evidence-based e-textbooks (e.g., UpToDate, Essential Evidence Plus, ACP PIER, Dynamed), a huge amount of clinical information can be accessed on the Web or on a personal digital assistant (PDA). Federated search engines searching simultaneous resources such as Infoclinique, TripDatabase and MacPlus can ease the process of finding answers to clinical questions in the maze of information. Most questions can be answered by a judicious combination of just a few of these resources. Reaching out to colleagues to obtain or share information about a clinical question has always been valued by health care professionals. This “exchange” strategy for keeping up-to-date and answering clinical questions is increasingly available through Web 2.0 functionalities (blogs/tweeters, wikis, pod/podcasts). Website such as Asklepios from the Canadian Medical Association is an example of the multiple initiatives now available to foster communities of practice among health care providers who are sharing similar interests. However, we are still at the “early adapters” phase of implementation and the effectiveness of these new e-tools to improve healthcare has yet to be demonstrated. By combining selected “push” and “pull” resources, the internet can provide access to useful information to facilitate evidence-based clinical care.

Introduction

Introduction Claire B. Potter (bio) It is a great privilege to be present as a historian when technology is shifting the terms of our intellectual practice. Because of my belief that academic blogging is a game-changing moment for scholars and feminists, I was particularly excited when the Journal of Women's History asked me to organize this cluster of articles. Our call asked potential authors to think about "the emergence of blogging as a location for critical thought among women in the historical profession; historians of women, gender and sexuality; and feminist scholars who may, or may not be, historians." Among other things, we asked: "What role does self-publishing on the Internet play in a profession where merit is defined by scholarly review and a rigorous editorial process? Is blogging itself developing rules and practices that will inevitably produce intellectual and scholarly hierarchies similar to those that blogging seeks to dismantle? Does feminist blogging offer particular opportunities for enhanced conversation about race, sexuality, class and national paradigms, or does it tend to reproduce existing scholarly paradigms and silences within feminist scholarship?" The call was properly printed, on actual paper, in the Journal of Women's History itself. It was then distributed in the online venues (list serves, e-newsletters, and wikis) that scholars now take for granted to support the work of conventional publication, conference organizing and the hiring of new faculty. But then it began to wander. Our call went up on Facebook, and a link (supported by Tiny.url) was tweeted on Twitter. Most effectively, perhaps, for several months, it was in view of an average 500 readers per day as a sidebar item on my own blog, Tenured Radical.1 From there it was picked up by RSS feed and delivered to the desktops of Tenured Radical followers; by LiveJournal sites that re-post automatically from my blog; and by scholarly blogs that make it their business to collate academic announcements and history business. Already, perhaps, you are beginning to understand the wild world that feminist bloggers inhabit. Our call drew a lively and inventive set of responses, originating in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations, from which the four [End Page 185] articles by Jennifer Ho, May Friedman, Marilee Lindemann, and Ann Little were developed. Rachel Leow, with whom I was e-acquainted through our mutual work on Cliopatria (a History News Network blog) agreed to comment.2 And we were off. The blend of old media, new media, and newest media that supported the production of this roundtable underlines the different forms of scholarly collaboration and exchange that digital communication now facilitates. Just as the circulation of email often replaces face-to-face meetings in the academy, electronic platforms now support traditional connections among scholars even as they facilitate new ones. Prior to assembling the group of bloggers who contributed to this roundtable, I had met only one of the participants (Ann Little) in person, and spoken on the telephone to a second (Jennifer Ho). While Rachel Leow and I were able to meet briefly in Cambridge, England in spring 2010 to discuss the framing of the round table, my relationships with Marilee Lindemann and May Friedman remain electronic for now. As feminist bloggers, this group assembled in this roundtable has many differences but we have at least two things in common. We all view ourselves as intellectuals; and we are all committed to feminist blogging as a literary practice, or tradition, that we are also inventing. This process of invention can be boundary breaking on a number of levels, and therefore, puts us in a position familiar to feminist scholars as we trouble conventional forms of intellectual respectability. "Academic blogging" can appear to be a contradiction for many of our non–blogging colleagues in the material, or what Little calls "the meat world." There is also a significant generational divide about the intellectual value of blogs; too many historians even remain skeptical of electronic scholarship that is refereed and governed by editorial boards. Blogging, in particular, is an activity associated most strongly with the young and the self-absorbed: this can render middle aged scholar-bloggers like Lindemann and myself even more suspect...

Beyond the OPAC: creating different interfaces for specialized collections in an ILS system

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss the experiment in creating featured collection web sites from specialized data in the Voyager integrated library system (ILS). The specialized interfaces for different collections aim to offer flexible collection‐driven web presentations for easier resource discovery and increased user attention.Design/methodology/approach – The Faculty Research Showcase and Women's Studies Video Resources web sites at Wichita State University (WSU) Libraries are discussed. The paper addresses the model used to create the web sites: selecting data from Oracle database, presenting SQL query results, and creating the web sites using ASP, XHTML and CSS for browsing and search. The alternative approach of using XML, XPath and ASP.NET is also discussed. Some features of the public web sites such as linking each record back to the online public access catalog (OPAC) and adding both really simple syndication (RSS) feeds and cover images using both syndetic and locally‐created graphics are add...

Websites of note

Websites of note

Content Licensing: Buying and Selling Digital Resources

Active in publishing for more than twenty years, Michael Upshall has been very involved in the move to electronic publishing and the content licensing arena. As publisher of the United Kingdom's first online encyclopedia, The Hutchinson Encyclopedia, he understands the pros and cons of the different digital resources, whether databases, journals and their articles, e-books, or other resources, as well as aggregators and distributors of those products. In Content Licensing, he helps the reader understand what is involved in licensing digital resources. This book is useful for those who produce, license, and use electronic content. This includes creators of the content, rights owners, vendors, aggregators, software solution providers, and ultimately, customers. Librarians who help produce electronic content for their institutions or those struggling with electronic copyright issues will find helpful topics throughout Content Licensing. The electronic licensing process is well covered. The author shows the steps needed from production in any market, to the specifics needed for content licensing in the digital market, through to the customer's purchase of the product. This process begins with creating the content, identifying the market, taking steps to license the information, converting it to a usable format, and obtaining all copyright and relevant permissions, and it ends with delivering the final product. Depending on the product that is available and the customer, numerous delivery methods exist. Digital information can be purchased through a secure website, on a CD-ROM, through subscriptions, in downloadable files, or by other means. Upshall then delves into the process of creating and providing the content. He includes a chapter on the technology needed to create and disseminate digital resources. For example, music downloads are handled much differently than medical journals. Delivery can be handled in different ways, such as through really simple syndication (RSS) feeds or podcasting, as well as downloadable portable document format (PDF) or e-book format files. After resources are available for purchase, vendors want to be able to track usage of their products. Upshall provides good explanations of the different business models used in providing digital resources. Chapter 5, about content licensing business models, is quite informative. Upshall explains the different levels in easy-to-understand terminology without getting bogged down in legal or technical terminology. This reviewer had a better picture of the process after finishing this chapter. This book goes beyond what is needed to publish digitally. Upshall explains the aggregation process. He devotes a chapter to searching for information by using Google and other search engines. He discusses the copyright process from the producer's and the customer's points of view. The issues involved in copyright are discussed and balanced in a chapter devoted to the topic as well as throughout the book, as different areas of content licensing involve copyright needs and rights. The case studies Upshall includes in different chapters are quite useful. Studies may show an example of a vendor with certain methods, products, or outcomes from certain decisions and legal interventions that demonstrate Upshall's information. The table of contents is easy to use. Not only are the chapters listed, but the sections within each chapter are also included. It is easy to locate the smaller sections on electronic rights or fair use in the copyright section. For example, RSS feeds and podcasting sections are quickly visible in the technology section. A separate table lists the images used in the book. Because notes appear at the end of each chapter, the reader can check Upshall's sources close to the sections where they are used. A glossary at the end of the chapters covers the terms Upshall uses throughout. A reference section includes books, websites, and other resources to help the reader learn more about content licensing. An index at the end gives the reader another method of quickly finding desired information. Content Licensing is excellent for learning the basics of what is needed for the digital resource market. While it delves into the areas necessary for the process, it touches lightly on most processes. This book is not an in-depth, how-to for any of the many steps needed to produce, license, and deliver electronic products. Instead, it is an introduction to what is involved. Upshall has written an easy book for readers to find out what they do not know.

Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere

This article reports on a research program that has developed new methodologies for mapping the Australian blogosphere and tracking how information is disseminated across it. The authors improve on conventional web crawling methodologies in a number of significant ways: First, the authors track blogging activity as it occurs, by scraping new blog posts when such posts are announced through Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Second, the authors use custom-made tools that distinguish between the different types of content and thus allow us to analyze only the salient discursive content provided by bloggers. Finally, the authors are able to examine these better quality data using both link network mapping and textual analysis tools, to produce both cumulative longer term maps of interlinkages and themes, and specific shorter term snapshots of current activity that indicate current clusters of heavy interlinkage and highlight their key themes. In this article, the authors discuss findings from a yearlong observation of the Australian political blogosphere, suggesting that Australian political bloggers consistently address current affairs, but interpret them differently from mainstream news outlets. The article also discusses the next stage of the project, which extends this approach to an examination of other social networks used by Australians, including Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This adaptation of our methodology moves away from narrow models of political communication, and toward an investigation of everyday and popular communication, providing a more inclusive and detailed picture of the Australian networked public sphere.

Recommendation System Using Weighted TF-IDF and Naive Bayes Classifiers on RSS Contents

A recent increase in RDF Site Summary (RSS) feeds, used for news updates and blogs, has been caused by the widespread use of blogs. This means that much effort is now needed to search the contents of RSS feeds because of this enormous quantity of material. To solve this problem, recommendation systems enable users to obtain relevant RSS contents easily and quickly. In previous research, an RSS recommendation system was proposed that used the similarity between the Term Frequency (TF) of the RSS contents and the TF derived from the contents of the user’s browsing history for RSS feeds. In this paper, we use Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) calculations to propose a Weighted TF-IDF method, which focuses on the terms folded by the title tags in RSS contents as characteristic terms. In addition, we propose a new recommendation method, which uses a Naive Bayes classifier in a Machine Learning-based approach. Via experiments, we compare the proposed methods and the existing method in a prototype recommendation system, and we show that the proposed methods outperform the existing method with respect to several evaluation measurements.

Use of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries: A reconnaissance of the international landscape

The purpose of this paper is to provide a reconnaissance of major academic libraries located in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and U.S.A. that have embraced Web 2.0 tools for enhancing library services. The research is based on a survey of websites of 277 university libraries. The checkpoints used for this evaluative study were given by Nguyen (2008) for evaluating various Web 2.0 tools. Additional checkpoints were arrived at after visiting and browsing the various sites. The findings of the study acknowledge the strength of Web 2.0 tools in improving library services for users. Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Instant Messaging (IM) and blogs are popular in academic libraries. The paper concludes by offering best practices for implementing Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries.

Use of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries: A reconnaissance of the international landscape

The purpose of this paper is to provide a reconnaissance of major academic libraries located in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and U.S.A. that have embraced Web 2.0 tools for enhancing library services. The research is based on a survey of websites of 277 university libraries. The checkpoints used for this evaluative study were given by Nguyen (2008) for evaluating various Web 2.0 tools. Additional checkpoints were arrived at after visiting and browsing the various sites. The findings of the study acknowledge the strength of Web 2.0 tools in improving library services for users. Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Instant Messaging (IM) and blogs are popular in academic libraries. The paper concludes by offering best practices for implementing Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries.

Two case studies in grammar-based test generation

Grammar-based test generation (GBTG) has seen extensive study and practical use since the 1970s. GBTG was introduced to generate source code for testing compilers from context-free grammars specifying language syntax. More recently, GBTG has been applied to many other testing problems, including the generation of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents and the generation of packets for testing communications protocols. Recent research has shown how to integrate covering-array techniques such as pairwise testing into GBTG tools. While the integration offers considerable power to the tester, there are few practical demonstrations in the literature. We present two case studies showing how to use grammars and covering arrays for automated software testing. The first case study exposes HTML injection vulnerabilities in an RSS feed parser. The second case study determines the effectiveness of network firewalls when faced with TCP flag attacks. The case studies illustrate the use of covering arrays in a GBTG context, the use of visualization to understand large test logs, and the issues and tradeoffs in the design of fully automated GBTG test suites.

Attack resilient P2P dissemination of RSS feed

RSS (really simple syndication) based feeds have become the defacto mechanism of web based publish subscribe. Peer-to-Peer delivery of such feeds can not only alleviate the load at the content server, but also reduce the dissemination latency. However, due to openness of P2P system, malicious peers can join the network as easily as normal peers do. Such malicious peers may pretend to relay but actually not, and thus deny service, or even disseminate counterfeit updates, rendering a Peer-to-Peer mechanism not only useless, but even harmful (e.g. by false updates). We propose overlay independent randomized strategies to mitigate these ill-effects of malicious peers at a marginal overhead, thus enjoying the benefits of Peer-to-Peer dissemination, along with the assurance of content integrity in RSS like web-based publish-subscribe applications without altering currently deployed server infrastructure. We conduct analysis of performance of our proposal by modeling behavior of the system and validating the same with simulation. Results show that our proposal is effective, robust and scalable.

The Declining Value of Subscription-based Abstracting and Indexing Services in the New Knowledge Dissemination Era

The author uses systematic random sampling to test the hypothesis that all scholarly journals have tables of contents and possibly abstracts and keywords posted on the Internet. This free bibliographic data allows users to browse and search articles and form the base for free interactive services, such as email alerts, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and API (application programming interface). Free abstracting and indexing services (A&I) around the world are growing both in numbers and in depth and breadth of coverage. With so many free alternatives for article search and retrieval, librarians may want to shift some of their budgets from commercial A&I services to other resources that do not have strong, free alternatives.

RSS Feeds from STM Databases: Innovative Possibilities.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds have been used in academic libraries to follow new information posted on blogs, wikis and web sites. Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) databases also offer RSS feeds which can be used by science librarians to track research being conducted in their subject areas. The knowledge gained from these constantly updated sources can help in collection development activities. RSS feeds can also be used to highlight grant-funded research and monitor trends in Open Access publishing. This article documents some unique ways of using RSS feeds from STM databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How Do You Read Your News?

How Do You Read Your News?

Anesthesia 2.0: Internet-based information resources and Web 2.0 applications in anesthesia education

Informatics is a broad field encompassing artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, information science, and social science. The goal of this review is to illustrate how Web 2.0 information technologies could be used to improve anesthesia education. Educators in all specialties of medicine are increasingly studying Web 2.0 technologies to maximize postgraduate medical education of housestaff. These technologies include microblogging, blogs, really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, podcasts, wikis, and social bookmarking and networking. 'Anesthesia 2.0' reflects our expectation that these technologies will foster innovation and interactivity in anesthesia-related web resources which embraces the principles of openness, sharing, and interconnectedness that represent the Web 2.0 movement. Although several recent studies have shown benefits of implementing these systems into medical education, much more investigation is needed. Although direct practice and observation in the operating room are essential, Web 2.0 technologies hold great promise to innovate anesthesia education and clinical practice such that the resident learner need not be in a classroom for a didactic talk, or even in the operating room to see how an arterial line is properly placed. Thoughtful research to maximize implementation of these technologies should be a priority for development by academic anesthesiology departments. Web 2.0 and advanced informatics resources will be part of physician lifelong learning and clinical practice.

The Declining Value of Subscription-based Abstracting and Indexing Services in the New Knowledge Dissemination Era

The author uses systematic random sampling to test the hypothesis that all scholarly journals have tables of contents and possibly abstracts and keywords posted on the Internet. This free bibliographic data allows users to browse and search articles and form the base for free interactive services, such as email alerts, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and API (application programming interface). Free abstracting and indexing services (A&I) around the world are growing both in numbers and in depth and breadth of coverage. With so many free alternatives for article search and retrieval, librarians may want to shift some of their budgets from commercial A&I services to other resources that do not have strong, free alternatives.

Sensing Semantics of RSS Feeds by Fuzzy Matchmaking

RSS feeds provide a fast and effective way to publish up-to-date information or renew outdated contents for information subscribers. So far RSS information is mostly managed by content publishers but Internet users have less initiative to choose what they really need. More attention needs to be paid on techniques for user-initiative information discovery from RSS feeds. In this paper, a quantitative semantic matchmaking method for the RSS based applications is proposed. Semantic information is extracted from an RSS feed as numerical vectors and semantic matching can then be conducted quantitatively. Ontology is applied to provide a common-agreed matching basis for the quantitative matchmaking. In order to avoid semantic ambiguity of literal statements from distributed and heterogeneous RSS publishers, fuzzy inference is used to transform an individual-dependent vector into an individual-independent vector. Semantic similarities can be revealed as the result.

A web service for enabling medical image retrieval integrated into a social medical image sharing platform.

Content-based visual image access is in the process from a research domain towards real applications. So far, most image retrieval applications have been in one specialized domain such as lung CTs as diagnosis aid or for classification of general images based on anatomic region, modality, and view. This article describes the use of a content-based image retrieval system in connection with the medical image sharing platform MEDTING, so a data set with a very large variety. Similarity retrieval is possible for all cases of the social image sharing platform, so cases can be linked by either visual similarity or similarity in keywords. The visual retrieval search is based on the GIFT (GNU Image Finding Tool). The technology for updating the index with new images added by users employs RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. The ARC (Advanced Resource Connector) middleware is used for the implementation of a web service for similarity retrieval, simplifying the integration of this service. Novelty of this article is the application/integration and image updating strategy. Retrieval methods themselves employ existing techniques that are all open source and can easily be reproduced.