David Shorthouse altered me to RSSBus, which is similar to Yahoo's Pipes, but Lance Robinson (the "Tech Evangelist" at RSSBus) argues that their product is much better. What is RSSBus?
RSSBus is a Really Simple Service Bus that uses the RSS protocol as the main interchange mechanism. RSS is an extensible protocol used to exchange Feeds of Items. Normally these are news items or blog postings, but they don't have to be: RSS Feeds may be augmented through standard RSS extensions to exchange any type of data.
RSSBus is a collection of tools and services that simplify the process of creating RSS Feeds with rich data extensions. Feeds are generated from RSSBus Connectors, reusable code modules that convert data into feeds. They do so by communicating with RSSBus over defined interfaces (please refer to our RSSBus Connectors Reference for details on building custom connectors).
RSSBus provides an infrastructure for generating, maintaining, combining, manipulating, and visualizing Feeds. Items and Feeds are orchestrated by the RSSBus Engine and together help create a loosely integrated application architecture which we like to refer to as RSS Web.
David says he has managed to recreate iSpecies on his desktop with RSSBus, which sounds cool. So far RSSBus is a Windows only tool, although there is code for other platforms listed on the blog. There is also a white paper.
Looks like the conversation on OpenSearch, RSS, and biodiversity informatics has only just got started.
