LSE’s training website, which aggregates RSS feeds from multiple training providers across the school, has been nominated for an award. Luis Martinez in the Library, Jeni Brown in IT Training, and Jane Secker and I in CLT developed the system, which has subsequently been extended to include the Teaching and Learning Centre, the Language Centre, and the Staff Development Unit. We extended RSS by referencing additional namespaces — the RSS Events and Dublin Core Terms namespaces. This allowed us to include additional metadata such as the date, time and location of the event, and its intended audience.

Each training provider generates an RSS feed from their events database, which is collected using Magpie RSS. All the feeds are rolled up into one, with events sorted chronologically. Here, RSS is acting as database abstraction layer: the aggregator doesn’t need to know details of each database implementation to obtain the information.

If you’re interested in the details, have a look at the technical documentation.

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