Introduction

The KNewsTicker Handbook
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# Chapter 1. Introduction

KNewsTicker is an applet for the KDE panel (also known as Kicker) which provides an easy and convenient way to access the news as reported by many news sites (such as Slashdot, Linux Weekly News or Freshmeat).

To archieve this, KNewsTicker requires the news sites to provide a special RDF or RSS file, which contains the headlines as well as pointers to the corresponding full articles. Such files are very common these days, and KNewsTicker already comes with a selection of good news sources which provide such files.

# 1.1. Brief Info On RDF Files

RDF files are becoming more and more popular these days, and this applet is not the first application which takes advantage of them. But what are RDF files? This section tries to give a brief answer to this questions, as well as pointers to other sources for further reference.

RDF is an acronym for "Resource Definition Framework". It has been invented by the World Wide Web Consortium and is one of the first applications of the Extended Markup Language (XML)). RDF files (as well as the very similiar RSS files) define and describe so-called Metadata, e.g. information about information.

RDF files can be used for all kinds of Metadata, not just news. Nevertheless, they have become very popular among the news sites as they provide a clean, simple and portable way to distribute news. The news sites provide a RDF file which basically contains a set of records, and each record consists of a headline and an URL which points to the complete article. Besides that, the RDF file contains also the official name of the news site as well as other general informations which are parsed and evaluated by KNewsTicker.

Of course, this is only a short and highly incomplete attempt at explaining the basic ideas behind RDF files and Metadata. If you're interested in this topic, you might want to visit any of the following links which point to further and more complete sources on this:

http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/rdf.html

  This page is a fairly well explanation of the Resource Definition Framework and provides a great list of links to more sites which deal with this topic. No special knowledge is needed to understand this page, and it's highly up to date.

http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/RDF-made-easy.html

  Here you can find a more pratical point of view on the Resource Definition Framework. This page demonstrates the usage of RDF files and shows why and when they are appropriate. The reader should be familiar with the XML 1.0 standard as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium before reading this text.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mingfai/rdf/

  This is a great and very comprehensive list of sites which deal with RDF files. You might want to consider bookmarking this page for further reference, as it's also fairly up to date and lists virtually no dead links.

http://www.w3.org/RDF/

  The authoratative source directly from the World Wide Web Consortium. It features a comprehensive list of links to other sites on the topic as well as a timeline of the RDF development, an overview over the architecture, an archive with articles about RDF as well as a carefully assembled list of tools for developers who intend to work with RDF.

If you find any other sites or documents on this topic, don't hesitate to send them to Frerich Raabe `<raabe@kde.org>` so that they can be included in this document and help everybody.

Thank you very much!

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