New Zealand Government Feed Standard 2009 (Second Consultation)
April 17th, 2009 by Matthew Ross
This proposed Government feed standard based on Atom will replace the 2003 e-GIF RDF specification for New Zealand Government feeds.
The consultation period runs to 20th May 2009.
[The first consultation from late 2008 is here with comments.]
Proposal Summary
Key details from the proposal are:
1. The new Government recommendation is to use the Atom 1.0 format for web feeds.
- Atom is an official specification managed by the IETF
- Atom uses the ISO 8601 date format
- Atom provides a mechanism to explicitly and unambiguously label the type of content.
The new format is fully understood by all common feed readers and aggregators, something that is not the case with the previous specification which was a customisation of RSS 1.0.
2. An atom category element should indicate whether the type of information is news, media release, job, consultation, tender, dataset or other future types.
3. The atom license element should be used to specify a licence which allows the appropriate level of re-use of the information.
Resources
- Download the draft New Zealand Government Feed Standard 2009
in Open Office .odf format or Microsoft .doc format - The Atom specification is at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
- Previous RDF (RSS) e-GIF standard (2003)
Examples
We have provided a number of example feeds at http://eg.elabs.govt.nz/feeds-2009/
- Example Atom feed
- Example complex Atom feed
The example feed viewed in Internet Explorer 8
Consultation
The consultation period runs to 5pm, 30th April 2009.
Please post comments here.
(109 votes, average: 3.07 out of 5)
Matthew Ross says:
May 1st, 2009 at 3:22 pmHere’s one concept showing what any 3rd party might do with structured information from government.
http://nz.elabs.govt.nz/
Matthew Ross says:
May 1st, 2009 at 4:27 pmExample structured feeds:
–
Consultation:
http://eg.elabs.govt.nz/feeds-2009/consultation-feed.xml
With atom category and custom elements for Closing Date, Consultation Category & Region.
–
Dataset:
http://eg.elabs.govt.nz/feeds-2009/dataset-feed.xml
Standard atom implementation is enough to convey title, location, licence keywords.
–
Job:
http://eg.elabs.govt.nz/feeds-2009/NZDF-vacancy-feed.xml
Example built from NZDF feed, with custom atom elements for Location, Job Category, Job Type, Employer.
–
If agencies would publish information feeds with this minimal level of enriched structure this would seed 3rd-party innovation for end-user solutions.
Jane Ratcliffe says:
May 4th, 2009 at 10:30 amLooks good Matthew, really keen to see what the next steps are for mass uptake across AoG?
Jamie Mackay says:
May 15th, 2009 at 1:05 pmThis looks good to me. The only addition you might want to consider is a reponse to the question, “What would I neeed to do to convert my current RSS feed to make it an Atom feed?”
cheers
Jamie
Nathan Wall says:
May 15th, 2009 at 4:13 pmThink you should reformat point 2) to emphasise that there is a specific list of feed types
2. An atom category element should indicate whether the type of information is
- news,
- media release,
- job,
- consultation,
- tender,
- dataset
or other future types as they are created and defined.
Agree with Jamie’s comment that some guidance around conversion is a good idea - would probably also go one step further - and provide some guidance on how agencies should “expose” their list of feeds to site users. There are a couple of different techniques, we may prefer one over the other.
Are we also going to standardise a location on agency websites? Somthing similar to the “About us” requirements set out in the web standards? Could be some merit in doing that.
Also, will there be a process/facility for agencies to submit the URL of their various feeds to a central location so AoG sites like govt.nz can easily mash up content?
Lastly, do you have an opinion on whether 3rd party feed creators or hosters can/should be used? For example, for quite some time creating a feed on the IR site was complicated and prone to errors. We experimented using a 3rd party scraper to assemble a feed for us, and got one running with very little effort, but never put it into production use. If another agency was in a similar situation, with a CMS that didnt deliver this functionality (or even no CMS at all), would use of a 3rd party scraper be OK?
IR’s first web feed for its main site is coming soon. Promise!
Cheers
NW
Glen Barnes says:
June 18th, 2009 at 5:40 pmHi,
The link to the Documents seem to be broken. Can you correct the links? Also if any department publishes a feed which has datasets in it them please let me know as I can consume this at the Open Data Catalogue.
Thanks,
Glen
Matthew Ross says:
August 3rd, 2009 at 5:53 pmWe have published an initial feed with government datasets. See
http://eg.elabs.govt.nz/datasets/datasets.xml
Matthew Ross says:
August 5th, 2009 at 4:51 pmA related post from Keith Booth plus discussion is at
http://blog.e.govt.nz/index.php/2009/08/03/exposing-non-personal-data-in-new-ways/