Converting BibTeX to RSS feeds: bib2rss.pl
Yesterday I was playing around with Peter Mika’s BuRST to create an RSS 1.0 feed of the publications of the Leibniz Center. We already use bibtex2html to generate a weekly update of our publications page.
BuRST services are used, amongst others, by the openacademia.org project to generate RSS feeds of the documents in their RDF triple store. See also Ivan Herman’s blog post on this subject.
However, the RSS generated by BuRST is targeted at RDF-aware clients, and does not contain the Dublin Core metadata used by RSS viewers such as Thunderbird, Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes or Mail (Leopard) to show human readable information.
The BuRST service at openacademia.org uses a BibTex to RDF perl script by Michel Klein to generate a SWRC compliant RDF description of bibliographies stored using the BibTeX format. I have modified his script in such a way that it can now generate simple lightweight RSS representations of BibTeX files.
Voila: bib2rss.pl
You can download it, and use it at your choosing (Michel has GPL-ed the original).
Some examples:
Publications of the Leibniz Center, as RSS 1.0 feed
http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/cgi-bin/bib2rss.pl?url=http://svn.leibnizcenter.org/svn/LeibnizBib/trunk/leibniz.bibPublications of the Leibniz Center, as RSS 1.0 feed with title and description
http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/cgi-bin/bib2rss.pl?url=http://svn.leibnizcenter.org/svn/LeibnizBib/trunk/leibniz.bib&title=LeibnizPubs&description=Publications%20of%20the%20Leibniz%20Center
Some issues:
- How to determine the dc:date of a publication RSS-item? Currently: all publications are dated on the first of January of every year. Dates in RSS are an issue anyway.
- Some RSS readers (Mail, Yahoo Pipes) do not show the dc:creator of RSS 1.0 items
- Apple Mail seems to disregard any dc:date in 2001 (weird!)
- bib2rss.pl depends on the Text::BibTeX module of the btOOL library.
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