The diagram corresponds to figure 4 of the doctoral thesis, Applications of Syndication for the Management of Bibliographic Catalogs. The graph explains all the steps that enable the functioning of content syndication. First, there must be a phase of content creation and editing. This means that content syndication without content is impossible; therefore, it relies on information published through digital media using various publishing tools, such as blogs, wikis, portals and websites, directories, social web platforms, etc. Any person can become the author of a syndication channel without being aware of it, from the moment they post comments on a post, a photograph, or a third-party comment. It is highly likely that, without noticing, the syndication channel is formed from the information that ordinary users write daily—consider the application of syndication techniques to email. However, for a syndication channel to incorporate the content written by an editor, columnist, blogger, researcher, student, or professor, a trigger is required: the action of Publishing or Saving within the tools used at each moment.
Diagram of content syndication operation in web environments
When the author clicks on that publish button, the written information is automatically stored in the database associated with the website, and subsequently, even before any response is returned, the syndication feed is automatically regenerated. This feed consists of a file, typically with an .xml extension, whose content is entirely automated according to the structure of one of the established syndication formats—such as RSS1.0, RSS2.0, or Atom. Any of these formats can store, field by field and tag by tag, a significant portion of the information published on the web. From this point onward, the dissemination phase begins—the part most visible and familiar to users. Syndication feeds are accessible via <link> elements placed within the <head></head> header tags. Initially, the presence of such links is easily detected by web browsers, enabling the user to subscribe to the syndication feed containing news or publications from a web resource. This process is known as aggregation, and the programs used for this purpose are called aggregators. In many cases, aggregators are also open-source programs that allow users to read in an organized manner all the syndication feeds they have subscribed to, enabling complete storage and utilization of information published on the web. For this purpose, a data transfer process is required—from the .xml file of the syndication feed to the aggregator’s database used by the user to read news. Although this step may seem irrelevant, it is fundamental to understanding how to leverage content syndication techniques for documentation purposes. In any case, the aggregator program includes a module or subprogram called a parser. A parser is a program that facilitates reading a file encoded according to a set of conventions. Applied to syndication, it is capable of interpreting the tags used in a given format to correctly extract the information they contain and store or prepare it for proper display and utilization by the user on screen. Such programs can be modified to read different encoding formats, allowing the general process of information redistribution to also be employed for the redistribution of specific bibliographic records—even entire library catalogs—thereby transforming it into one of the most versatile processes in modern documentation.