Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I was looking at the RSS spec a while back to figure out how the category field was supposed to work and ended up digging up web directory history.

https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.

 help



Taxonomy labels are often deduplicated on Wikidata, the unofficial "hub" of the modern Semantic Web. There's already a defined property for matching DMOZ/Curlie labels, and others could be added if relevant.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: