JISC

Nature developed an open source tool for information providers called Urchin to aggregate, filter, and display information from RSS feeds.

Full Project Title

Open Source Customisable RSS Aggregator and Filter

Summary

At the time of this project in 2003, Nature Publishing Group saw the potential of RSS news feeds in publishing. Nature was already using RSS for news and alerting services for its journal readers. However, Nature also saw that there were barriers to more widespread adoption of RSS in the publishing community: 

• Information providers must write custom code to publish RSS feeds
• It’s difficult for non-programmers to merge and filter RSS feeds
• It’s harder still for publishers to set up RSS-based news aggregation services for particular areas of interest, e.g. customised alerts. 

Nature therefore set out to develop a tool to overcome these barriers.  They developed an open source tool called Urchin, a software framework for aggregating, filtering, and displaying information from RSS feeds.  For information providers who simply want to publish RSS feeds from information currently held in a database, an XML file or a web page, Urchin includes modules that can help to achieve this, requiring only enough system administration skill to install and configure the software, and no detailed knowledge of RSS.  For more ambitious publishers, the entire Urchin system can be used to create highly configurable RSS aggregation and filtering services that allows customised feeds and dynamic web pages to be generated extremely quickly. It therefore allows a much broader range of people and organisations to publish and consume information as RSS.

Outcomes

JISC commissioned an independent review of Urchin from Ben Hammersley, an international expert on RSS and a member of the RSS 1.0 Working Group.  Ben concluded that Urchin is “excellent” and “a milestone in its class”.  He commented that “In funding this project, you not only got your money's worth, but also changed the world a little”.  However, he did note a few areas where Urchin could be improved.  JISC and Nature responded by jointly funding additional development to address these points.

Outputs

Tools

Urchin is an open source tool and is released under the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License.  The Urchin software and supporting documentation can be found on the Urchin page at SourceForge.

Evaluation

Ben Hammersley’s evaluation of Urchin can also be found on the Urchin page at SourceForge. 

• Ben Hammersley, A Report to the JISC Regarding Nature Publishing Group’s Project “ROSA”, 2003

Presentations

The two presentations below give Nature’s perspective on RSS and Urchin.  The first focuses on the development of Urchin.  The second gives a broader view of RSS and the use of tools like Urchin in publishing. 

• Ben Lund, Urchin: A JISC-funded Open Source Software Development Project, OSS Watch Conference: Open Source Deployment and Development, Oxford, 11 December 2003: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2003-12-11/
• Howard Ratner, RSS: Really Simple Syndication – A Publisher’s Perspective, presentation at NISO Workshop on Metadata Practice on the Cutting Edge, Washington, DC, 20 May 2004: http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/MD-2004_agenda.html

Publications

This seminal article gives an excellent overview of RSS in publishing, and explains how Nature developed and uses Urchin. 

• Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, and Ben Lund, The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web, D-Lib Magazine, December 2004, 10(12) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html

Further Information

• Urchin page at SourceForge: http://urchin.sourceforge.net/
• PALS 1 project page: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_pals/project_rosa
• Project contact: Timo Hannay, Nature, email: t.hannay@nature.com