TCI WebServices

What are web services? - Webservices is a generic name for small web pages exchanged between machines. These pages can be complex SOAP/.Net query/response interactions, or plain old HTTP GET/POST/PUT (aka REST); try as they will the proponents of the former cannot find a single compelling example of a service that cannot be done the old-fashioned way. This page contains some simple public-service webservices.

Aggregated News in RDF

The links on this page download small XML files containing aggregated news items collected by our staff, repackaged into RDF for easy import into your own webserver or desktop aggregator (such as RadioUserland or Peerkat). Our in-house intranet uses these feeds to give us a quick overview of the latest news across many categories through little sidebar boxes such as the following:

Of course, RDF feeds only scratch the surface of any definition of web services; using XML through a plain ordinary web-server means you can transfer any kind of complex information from one computer to another, for example, inventory or order transactions, data queries, or even to distribute processing power to create virtual supercomputers. All this an more is possible.

XML/RDF News Feeds

The following links are Resource Description Format XML files, sometimes called Rich Site Summaries, produced by TCI news robots. Some describe Amazon gear for sale on our site, some of them are aggregated by sifting the parent sites using the old free NewsClipper, re-aggregating the news headlines using Peerkat or our own formating utilities, and then exporting the output as XML.

This service is highly experimental, and many feeds are not fully tested! Some have stray HTML in them that breaks XML parsing, some are really RSS 0.91 feeds. No guarantees are given or implied. Test against the DTD before you use any of these files.

Several feeds are also available in the older NetCenter RDF 0.91 format:

Teledynamics makes no guarantees or promises about these feeds; we only relay headlines which link to the original external sites, most often without permission -- complaints over copyright should be directed to teledynamics.

XSL Transforms

The following transforms are used on this site to render the above XML files: