Statistics
Displaying 1 To 3 Of 3 Comments New Zealand Government Feed Standard 2009 (Second Consultation) Think 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 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 Comment Posted By Nathan Wall On May 15, 2009 @ 4:13 pm New Zealand Government Feed Standard (Consultation) Matthew - Ive looked at the Beehive site you mentioned - and this is what I had in mind when I commented above - I want to be able to pick and choose what I subscribe to. Maybe the answer is that agencies need to do both? Publish a core feed of all their content, suitably tagged and categorised, and then a minimal set of filtered feeds? If we are doing one, then the other is not that much extra to do. That serves both purposes — aggregation across government, and specific user interests. There is of course the issue that some agencies will face (no names mentioned)……. all of the above discussion is assuming that they actually will be able to generate the necessary output from their various CMS / publishing systems… I agree that the web standards have a role to play. Another random thought Ive just had — would be worthwhile doing some thinking about how agencies could effectively track and measure traffic generated by consumption of the feeds — be an interesting evaluation exercise to demonstrate growth in traffic simply by exposing content via a feed. Comment Posted By Nathan Wall On August 13, 2008 @ 9:09 pm It seems to me there are two aspects to consider here: 1) Should agencies be required to publish more information as feeds? Here’s my 10 cents worth ***** 1) Should agencies be required to publish more information as feeds - such as reports, media releases, consultations, announcements and alerts, and other items that would be in the public interest — IMHO absolutely — I dont have time to trawl through the hundreds of government sites looking for new information — if its pushed out to me, I can filter out what I want to look at from the “background noise” — heaven forbid I could actually subscribe to some super feeds that aggregate results across agencies….. ***** 2) Whats the most effective use of the categorisation feature of ATOM feeds? Should agencies be using the category tag (which is not necessarily a controlled vocabulary) to indicate the type of document or service the feed relates to? Im not so clear on this one…. Is this just the mechanism the newzealand.govt.nz portal is using to differentiate feed content? As a consumer of these types of feeds I personally wouldnt want to have all sorts of information jumbled up into a single feed. For example, if I want to subscribe to a collection of reports from an agency, maybe I dont want their media releases as well. The example of the travel alerts is another great one — I travel overseas every now and then - being able to subscribe just to the travel alerts would be worthwhile - but surely I should be subscribing to a feed not a vast dump of information where I have to hope that the agency producing the feed has been consistent in its use of category terms? The categories in this instance could probably just refer to the geographic location and status of the travel advisory? As I understand it, the ATOM specification does enable controlled vocabularies to be set for category terms - but given the limitations of other vocabularies like SONZ and FONZ — not sure this is a good idea. Which leads me to believe that the category tags should be treated as a folksonomy and agencies are free to choose the most appropriate terms they think describe their content. If the portal requires us to separate feeds into different document or service types then different feeds is probably the most flexible and scalable? We could then require agencies to produce the minimum set of feeds and publish them in a consistent location? ***** Also, on looking at the RFC 4287 specification there is an element for atom:logo and atom:icon - that are apparently not widely used, but can be considered part of the branding that can be applied to any feed. Has there been any thought around using either/both of these elements to add authority to the feed - and standardising the image(s) used? I don’t have a particular opinion one way or the other on this point. Comment Posted By Nathan Wall On August 13, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
Comments Posted By Nathan Wall
- news,
- media release,
- job,
- consultation,
- tender,
- dataset
or other future types as they are created and defined.
2) Whats the most effective use of the categorisation feature of ATOM feeds?
