In conjunction with the publication of my doctoral thesis, Applications of Syndication for the Management of Bibliographic Catalogs, some of the most relevant and interesting embedded schemas will be presented on mblazquez.es with the aim of facilitating their dissemination and sharing within the scientific community. In this case, the schema corresponds to the Timeline of the Evolution of Syndication Formats, to which the XML formats related to bibliographic description have also been added.
Figure 1. Timeline of the Evolution of Syndication Formats
The evolution of the first RSS syndication format, created by Dave Winer on his news portal Scripting News in 1998, up to its current version RSS 2.0.11 in 2009, has been highly complex due to the diverse trends in development and original objectives—namely, the rapid and simple transmission of news, notes, and articles on digital publishing platforms, or in other words, the redistribution of information. As the web evolved, the RSS format devised by Dave Winer branched into a specific version designed to establish the principles of the semantic web, originally conceived as RSS1.0 or RDF (Resource Description Framework). The framework format for resource description subsequently led to the development of specialized modules or microformats focused on identifying and describing features more oriented toward documentary analysis, such as Dublin Core in RDF, or even the PRISM1.0 format (2.1) for describing periodical and serial publications. Meanwhile, parallel to these developments, formats from the Library of Congress emerged, based on XML and designed to store information from cataloging description fields in MARC. This format is referred to as MARC-XML, considered the natural translation of MARC21 into the extensible markup language XML. With this development, the Library of Congress achieved the ability to migrate information from its catalogs in a simple and effective manner. Indeed, it increasingly recognized the importance of interoperability among bibliographic records and linked MARC-XML to the development of specialized authority metadata such as MADS, specialized metadata for documentary objects such as MODS, and finally metadata about descriptive metadata, known as METS. All these description systems contribute to building an interconnected network of information that facilitates the creation of a semantic bibliographic web. Simultaneously, another format closely related to syndication emerged on the web: OPML, also created by Dave Winer. The brilliance of this format lies in its ability to aggregate thousands of syndication channels—i.e., thousands of information source addresses—into a single file, organized through simple thematic classification. Although it is not currently used with great frequency, OPML is a recognized and widely employed format by major institutions and media and information technology companies worldwide, such as the BBC.