Data feed
Encyclopedia
Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used by real-time
Real-time computing
In computer science, real-time computing , or reactive computing, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"— e.g. operational deadlines from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within strict time constraints...

 applications in point-to-point settings as well as on the world-wide web. The latter is also called Web feed
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...

. News feed is a popular form of Web feed. RSS feed makes dissemination of blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s easy. Product feeds
Product feeds
A product feed is a file that contains all information about the products of a specific company or companies in the e-commerce industry. Product feeds supply the content that is presented on many kinds of e-commerce websites such as search engines, price comparison websites, affiliate networks, and...

 play increasingly important role in e-commerce and internet marketing
Internet marketing
Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing of products or services over the Internet...

. Data feeds usually requires structured data. At the present time unstructured data, e.g. HTML pages, dominate the Web. As a result, data feeds have the potential to make a bigger impact on the Web in the future.

Data feed formats

  • RSS
    RSS
    -Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...

     1.0, 2.0
  • Atom feed
  • RDF feed
    RDF feed
    RDF feed refers to data feed in RDF format. RDF is an emerging semantic web standard language ideal for describing real world objects, and the resulted RDF data resources can be consumed by computers . Theoretically, every web site can create RDF resources for all the information on the web site...

  • Comma-separated values
    Comma-separated values
    A comma-separated values file stores tabular data in plain-text form. As a result, such a file is easily human-readable ....

     (CSV)

Emerging semantic data feed

The Web is evolving into a web of data or Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

. Data will be encoded by Semantic Web languages like RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 or OWL
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

according to many experts' visions. So, it is not difficult to envision data feeds will be also in the form of RDF or OWL. A big advantage of providing semantic data feeds, i.e. feeding data in Semantic Web standards, is that the data can then be readily consumed and reused by other computers. Examples of semantic data feed are available on the Ufeed online service. Ufeed allows users to create feeds in RDF format for various types of data, which include product information, news, events, job openings and studies.

CSV datafeed and affiliate marketing

CSV datafeeds are mostly being used within the affiliate marketing. Affiliate or so called publisher websites load the CSV file to load product information from online webshops. This way it is a lot easier to load thousands of product to the website. CSV isn't like XML and isn't as semantic but it does have a good basic structure. This file format can easily be created and loaded with any spreadsheet program like Excel.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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