Introduction and Background

In a previous note, I described at a high level the vision for “Data RSS”. In a future note I willdescribe it in some more technical detail. Here I would like to lay out a scenario to illustrate how Iimagine this to work and indeed why I am excited about this direction.Data RSS is a simple standard format for publishing and accessing data sets over Rest APIs. It’s arecipe that can be followed to make one or more data sets available over the web. It’s a recipe thatcan be followed to write applications, widgets and web sites who use data sets published by others.It is a fully decentralized approach where the two parties, publishers and accessors, do not have to coordinate with each other. Each can work independently of the other because they arefollowing a standard “plug and socket” scheme.For our purposes, a data set is a table of information, numeric, textual, dates and times andcurrencies. A data set can be small (for example, the names and phone numbers of all USSenators). A data set can be huge (for example, the list of all purchase orders issued by City Hallover a period of time.)Data RSS is about enabling a kind of ecology of data publishers and accessors who don't need to coordinate with each other, so that when for example the DOX starts publishing data, existingwidgets and reporting tools, and notiﬁcation managers, etc etc can all immediately be hooked in.The effect is that, for example, the DOX doesn't feel like, why did I bother writing this whole RESTAPI for my data, now I have to go convince people to use it.

Scenario

How would it work? Lets take a hypothetical example.Apps for America developer billnotify.org creates a notiﬁcation tool so that a user can ask toreceive an email whenever a piece of legislation is sponsored by a congressman from some statewhich has some word in the title, the user gets an email.Simple idea, assuming there's an API where the titles and states of authorship of a piece of legislation is available. There happens to be such an API. GovTrack.us provides an API which returnsinformation about bills in congress, including what congressperson sponsored it, and the name of the bill.So billnotify.org has a reasonably straightforward approach:1.Every day, call the GovTrack.us API to see what new bills have been offered.2.Look up the sponsoring congress person and their state3.Notify any billnotify.org users if a bill matching their criteria have been offered.

Data RSS - Sample Scenario

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Pito Salas -rps@salas.com- March 23 2009