Lately, I've been researching RSS. This is possibly the simplest XML standard possible. It's purpose is to distribute metadata about news headlines on News websites. The main use is news syndication, but people are finding all sorts of other uses. It's been sufficiently successful that there are >3000 sites creating an RSS file, Yahoogroups generates it for all it's mailing lists. There's a NASDAQ stock feed. There are now numerous news aggregators competing with Moreover, iSyndicate, etc etc. http://blogspace.com/rss/ for background.
Then, like everyone, I've been following the Napster saga. One way of looking at Napster is that they provided an extraordinarily simple Index server that operated on a small amount of metadata about mp3 files.

Then I'm in the B2B business and catalogue aggregation is just not working. The Business XML standards are way too complicated. Too many people are trying to aggregate Catalogues in e-Procurement systems and their suppliers of the data don't want to play.

So here's a proposal. RSC, the "Really Simple Catalogue" standard.

RSC attempts to define *just* enough metadata about a set of product SKUs to allow RSC files to be collected, aggregated, categorized and searched.

It should be almost trivial for anyone who maintains a catalogue of their products (even in Excel) to create and publish an RSC file.

It should be simple and straightforward to collect RSC files and process them.

RSC should *not* attempt to exhaustively describe each SKU. If you need a full description you punch through to the link for each SKU. It's up to the RSC publisher to do something with this.

Something like this:-

<Channel>

  <Title>The Widget Company</Title>

  <URLhttp://www.widgets.com</URL

  <SKU> <Title>LH Widgets</Title>

    <URLhttp://www.widgets.com/products.cgi?id=23</URL

    <DESCRIPTIONLeft Handed Widget</DESCRIPTION

    <localid>23</localid>

    <Category>Woggles</Category>

  </SKU>

<Channel>

So:- - Is this insane? - Is somebody already doing this? - Would it help?
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