Feed Querying as a Proxy for Querying the Web

Managing information, access to information, and updates to relevant information on the Web has become a challenging task because of the volume and the variety of information sources and services available on the Web. This problem will only grow because of the increasing number of potential information resources, and the increasing number of services which could be driven by machine-friendly access to these resources. In this paper, we propose to use the established and simple metamodel of feeds as a proxy for information resources on the Web, and to use feed-based methods for producing, aggregating, querying, and publishing information about resources on the Web. We propose an architecture that is flexible and scalable and uses well-established RESTful methods of loose coupling. By using such an architecture, mashups and the repurposing of Web services is encouraged, and the simplicity of the underlying metamodel places no undue restrictions on the possible application areas.