iChating with David Remsen earlier this morning, and he suggested using RSS feeds as a way of data providers "notifying" clients if their data has changed (e.g., if they've added some new names). Nice idea, and frees the client (such as a triple store) from having to download the entire data set every time, or to compute the difference between the data held locally and the data held by the remote source. Turns out that HTTP conditional GET can be used to tell if something has changed.
So, the idea is that a data source timestamps its data, and when data is modified it adds the modified records to its RSS feed. The data consumer peridically checks the RSS feed, and if it has changed it grabs the feed and stores the new data (which, in the case of a triple store can be easily parsed into a suitable form).
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I suggested the use of RSS to monitor changes to a LSID authority and so far it has gone down like a lead balloon. There seem to be warmer feelings about implementing the OAI standard.
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