JSON APML

[David P. Novakovic]

I think as we see more and more web services become APML, people are
going to want to display cool representations of APML in various
javascript based widgets. For this reason I think it'd be great to
define a JSON version of APML in the early days so that JSON APML
brokers are as interoperable as XML ones.

It shouldn't be too hard to do, and it makes a lot of sense to get in
and do it early.

Thoughts?

David

[Ben Novakovic]

I couldn't agree more Dave. Being a JS developer myself, it would be
great to see a standard for APML in JSON format.

Ben

On Dec 10, 12:13 pm, "David P. Novakovic" <davidnovako...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Chris Saad]

You boys wouldn't be related by any chance would you :D

Chris

Particls.com - Are You Paying Attention?
Engagd.com - The Open Attention Platform
Media2.0Workgroup.org - Social, Democratic, Distributed
APML.org - The OPML of Attention
DataPortability.org - The next frontier; Data

[Ashley Angell]

I think that if anyone was going to do an JSON representation of APML, they
should checkout the "official" open source C# APML library.

Basically its just a collection of collections of different APML "types"
Sources, Concepts etc - which I think would translate to JSON very easily.
I think that trying to standardise the library implementations of APML data
would make the transition between library versions (.Net, Python, JSON etc)
extremely easy since they would all effectively behave the same.

I'm not trying to say that the open source library is the be-all and
end-all, obviously its open to improvements; but its just my thoughts.

Ash

[David P. Novakovic]

I agree that it is a good idea to have some form of unified API, but
that's beside the point of actual serialisation.

JSON doesn't have attributes, types or elements. For example, so would
the json entry for a representation for two implicit concepts could be
something like:

"attention": {"updated": "2007-03-11T01:55:00Z", "from":
"GatheringTool.com", "value": "0.99"},
"content distribution": {"updated": "2007-03-11T01:55:00Z", "from":
"GatheringTool.com", "value": "0.97"}}

This is pretty self explanatory, but when it comes to defining the
APML head and other complex elements like a source with an author it
is better for there to be no doubt. I'm asserting that there should be
a page on the wiki that has a JSON spec for apml already defined. So
when developers go to look for one, they don't need to recreate it
themselves.

Since JSON is basically a complex hash structure, the simple
definition of this format will make actual APML generation
implementation libraries easier to write, since native -> apml-json is
easier than native -> apml-xml.

David

[Ashley Angell]

Ok np - true good call - are you happy to make a start to this and update
the appropriate WIKI pages?

[David P. Novakovic]

I'll try get a draft here over the next few days. Happy to accept
comments from any observers.

David