On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Dan Brickley wrote:

[everything except the point he originally intended]

I wanted to mention an idea I've sat on for a few months, but failed to
flatten.

RDF/XML Service Discovery seems to be a hot topic. Well, XML stuff in
particular, industry having gone bananas over it. I have in mind a
lightweight, distributed, scaleable, standards-based infrastructure to
support XML service and datasource discovery for B2B and P2P apps,
middleware and n-tiered acronym generation.

Let's start a Usenet newsgroup.

I started to draft a request for news:alt.rdf.* group(s). Idea was
that a simple good old fashioned usenet group would be a great way for XML/RDF
apps to publish and discover services and data. We already have global
infrastructure in place to support this, Perl, Java etc client libraries
and lots more. Unlike Web-based aggregation and 'e-market' sites, the
lack of central management depoliticises things rather helpfully. No one
WWW site gets to be the central whiteboard on which RDF/XML apps
scribble messages to one another. Contrast: if I'd just suggested that
everyone uses www.danbri.org as a central service for sharing RSS files,
that'd be rather different.

There would be a lot of detail to work out, and I don't want to distract
RSS-DEV from the 1.0 effort, but thought it was about time to make this
thought bookmarkable. I lack familiarity with the politics and ritual
of Usenet group creation, but intend to give it a go. My understanding
is that the alt.* hierarchy is easier to get a group established in, but
less well replicated. I suggest we (if anyone agrees this isn't
crazy) try an alt group first, then take things from there. One
oddity: usenet to date seems split between human-oriented text groups
and the 'binary' groups for images etc. What I'm proposing is a
machine-oriented group. I'm not sure if the Usenet crowd would like
this, so eg. we might suggest that postings are multipart, with human
and machine readable sections.

Anyway, what do you all reckon? am I making any sense?

Dan

ps. would also be a nice place to experiment with digitally signed
metadata, another sideline I'm investigating.