RLI vs. Atom
I’ve been talking with some people at Oxford University who are doing some work with the IMS Resource List Interoperability. From the main page:
The Resource List Interoperability (RLI) specification details how structured meta-data can be exchanged between systems that store and expose resources for the purpose of creating resource lists and those that gather and organize those Resource Lists for educational or training purposes. A typical example of such a resource list is a reading list.
I confess, I really don’t understand the need for this sort of spec. It’s horribly complex, for what benefit? Rather than reuse existing bibliographic metadata specs like MODS, it defines that as well. I see virtually no chance that any of the sort of hackers who do a lot of the innovation on the web are ever likely to look at it seriously.
Meanwhile, there is Atom, which is described like so in the spec:
Atom is an XML-based document format that describes lists of related information known as “feeds”. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as “entries”, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title.
Maybe I’m missing somethiing, but it seems to me to serve the same broad purpose as RLI. Atom has some of the smartest people in the world of web and xml rechnologies working on it, and it shows. The spec is simple and flexible, and will be far more widely deployed than any IMS spec will ever be. Indeed, Mozilla already supports Atom, and IIRC Safari will soon too. So an instructor could construct a course reading list for her students, and they could access it directly in their browsers. Likewise for scholars collaborating on a research project.
So why do I want to use a reading list format that only a narrow range of applications will ever read?
