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Monday, June 08, 2009

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joe

I'd like to know just how varied the various agency infrastructures are... that is, if I wanted to write the back-end stuff, just what the hell do I have to support? That question scares me.

dret

@joe: the whole idea of a simple and standards-based architecture is that it minimizes the effort it takes to participate (for publishers *and* consumers). producing feeds often can be done with feed packages already existing, or at the very least you'll have some XML support and can create feeds at that level. if the guidelines specified templates and examples, it really wouldn't be all that scary. our stuff at http://isd.ischool.berkeley.edu/stimulus/feeds/ has been scraped from recovery.gov with some PHP and then we use XSLT to produce feeds and XML reports. it's not pretty, because we have to deal with the excel data published by recovery.gov, but it's not rocket science either and probably did not take more than a week or two. so it's really doable, and it's not hard, either.

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