RSS and the subscribe model

There has been a idea (a meme) building for a while around the use of RSS (or atom) as a possible way of sharing and propagating information both internally and externally in a business.

Adam Bosworth has a great podcast on this subject when he was talking about Google and his version of a distributed DNS-like database.

As I was reviewing by blog aggregator (sage) for firefox I found another link to a page dedicated about RSS in the enterprise.

RSS builds on the acceptance of XML as a basis for sharing information between companies, there are various formats out there for your standard B2B solution. With Oracle getting into the vertical integration game and almost every major software vendor pushing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) I am sure it won't be long before RSS in some form appears as a solution for retrieving data from diverse data sources.

This is the database replication model where RSS tells you what has changed so you get everything incrementally which is faster. You also could only get what you want to receive, pulling that data you want, or even what you are allowed to see, which provides security and privacy.

The possibilities are big... what about a way where you take one or more feeds add some value and pass that new feed onto as a new RSS. This is what people call mashups or remixing.
For all the database people this is like a view on one or more tables, your VIEW of the data which is feed to you.

From a monitoring point of view, wouldn't it be nice to be able to pull the data you want and forget the rest.

The last interesting idea is based on a metaphor from this article if you pass around XML, you could pass S-expressions, pass around s-expressions and you can pass not only data but code. I had an idea or thought, after reading that article, that maybe the data in a database is really code after all, the tables being just functions (or relations in the original sense), the data model actually reflective the function of the business (the business model) in abstraction.

So you could in fact use RSS not only to share data or a view of data but also share code or functions.

Have Fun