Metadata Publication

Personalized metadata is a good idea, but it needs a concrete representation. There was no question that the standard should be based on XML. Plus, there are obvious similarities between publishing your metadata and publishing news stories, so RSS was a natural starting point. Services like del.icio.us already use RSS for distributing bookmarked web pages; one kind of metadata.

RSS Format

Outfoxed uses RSS 1.0 to encode user's reports. The only tags from non-standard modules are of:scope and of:quality.

Scope indicates how broadly the report can be applied. If it is empty or missing, this indicates that the report applies only to the specific URI of the rdf:about tag. Otherwise, it must contain some portion of the rdf:about URI with *'s indicating where it can be generalized. For example, *getoutfoxed.com* would apply to every page on this website.

Quality indicates the subjective evaluation of the specified resource. Range is from 100 (Absolutely perfect) to -100 (Completely dangerous). A value of 0 indicates that the quality is unknown, or cannot be determined. If the specified resource is another RDF file, it indicates the degree of trust. (Or to be more precise, the confidence/probability that the subjective values of the target file's creator are the same as the source page's creator.)

Informer pages are indicated by the presence of _RSS in the <dc:subject> tag.

It is reccomended that you provide an XSL stylesheet which can transform the RSS into HTML. (Sample XSL File)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="users/outfoxed.xsl"?>

<rdf:RDF 
  xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/" 
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" 
  xmlns:taxo="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/taxonomy/"
  xmlns:of="http://trustbase.org/quality/0.1/">

  <channel rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/trust.xml">
    <title>Outfoxed Home</title>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/<link/>
    <description>Default informer.<description/>
    <image rdf:resource="http://getoutfoxed.com/files/outfoxed_profile_pic.jpg"/>
    <dc:subject/>
    <items>
      <rdf:Seq>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://www.wanderingstan.com/"/>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/dangerous"/>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/good"/>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/bad"/>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://getoutfoxed.com/users/stan"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </items>
  </channel>
  
  <image rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/files/outfoxed_profile_pic.jpg">
    <title>Outfoxed Home</title>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/</link>
    <url>http://getoutfoxed.com/files/outfoxed_profile_pic.jpg</url>
  </image>
  
  <item rdf:about="http://www.wanderingstan.com/">
    <title>wanderingstan</title>
    <link>http://www.wanderingstan.com/</link>
    <description>Stan's home page</description>
    <dc:creator>Outfoxed Home</dc:creator>
    <dc:date>2005-04-02T18:17:11Z</dc:date>
    <of:quality>50</of:quality>
    <of:scope>*wanderingstan.com*</of:scope>
    <dc:subject>stan homepage blog travel cogsci</dc:subject>
  </item>

  <item rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/dangerous">
    <title/>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/dangerous</link>
    <description>Sample Dangerous Page</description>
    <dc:creator>Outfoxed Home</dc:creator>
    <dc:date>2005-04-02T18:17:11Z</dc:date>
    <of:quality>-50</of:quality>
    <of:scope/>
    <dc:subject>sample</dc:subject>
  </item>

  <item rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/good">
    <title/>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/good</link>
    <description>Sample Good Page</description>
    <dc:creator>Outfoxed Home</dc:creator>
    <dc:date>2005-04-02T18:18:52Z</dc:date>
    <of:quality>50</of:quality>
    <of:scope/>
    <dc:subject>sample</dc:subject>
  </item>
  
  <item rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/bad">
    <title/>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/sample/bad</link>
    <description>Sample bad page.</description>
    <dc:creator>Outfoxed Home</dc:creator>
    <dc:date>2005-04-02T18:17:24Z</dc:date>
    <of:quality>-25</of:quality>
    <of:scope/>
    <dc:subject>sample</dc:subject>
  </item>

  <item rdf:about="http://getoutfoxed.com/users/stan">
    <title>stan</title>
    <link>http://getoutfoxed.com/users/stan</link>
    <description>Author of Outfoxed.</description>
    <dc:creator>Outfoxed Home</dc:creator>
    <dc:date>2005-05-02T16:15:20Z</dc:date>
    <of:quality>50</of:quality>
    <of:scope/>
    <dc:subject>_RSS outfoxed programming javascript python travel</dc:subject>
  </item>

</rdf:RDF>

RTS 0.2 (Experimental)

RTS 0.2

This standard was used in early beta testing, and is still recognized, but should not be used.

<rts version="0.2">
  <channel>

    <profile>
      <uri>http://www.trustbase.org/users/stan.xml</uri>
      <name>Stan</name>    
      <link>http://www.wanderingstan.com</link>
      <description>I'm a student at the University of Osnabrueck.</description>
      <image>http://www.trustbase.org/users/stan.jpg</image>
    </profile>		

    <reports>

      <report>
         <scope>*metafilter.com*</scope>
         <uri>http://www.metafilter.com/</uri>
         <trust degree="50"/>
         <description>
           Nice source for fun links. 
           See also&lt;a href="http://www.monkeyfilter.com"&gt;monkeyfilter&lt;/a&gt;
         </description>
         <date>2005-01-02T23:04Z</date>    
      </report>    
      .
      .  
      .
    </reports>

    <informers>

      <informer>
        <uri>http://www.trustbase.org/users/koenigb.xml</uri>
      </informer>    
      .
      .
      .
    </informers>

scope

http://www.google.com/
*news.google.com*
*google.com*

uri

A "representative" link for this URI. If the user clicks on this report, this is where they will be taken.

trust

The degree attribute indicates, basically, the quality of the content found within scope. (Yes, it is poorly named.) There are no rules as to what the values must mean other than this: Values below 0 are poor quality, or anything that should be avoided. A value equal to zero indicats the content is completely average. A value above zero indicates the content has good quality. Currenly, Outfoxed uses these values: Dangerous = -50, Bad = -25, Good = 50.

description

A description of the content found within scope, reasoning for the quality rating given, and anything else the informer giving the report wants to say. Links are allowed, but the anglebrackets must be encoded.

date

Date that this report was made.