1393 RSS in Virtual Organizations Tom Chan Southern New Hampshire Univesity, USA R introduction Rich site summary (RSS) is a type of XML document used to share Web contents. Originally designed by Netscape (http://www.netscape.com) to create cus- tomize Web channels, RSS has been adopted by news syndication services, Weblogs, Webcasting and online information services. RSS is thus also known as "Really Simple Syndication". While around for many years, it is now quickly gaining momentum owing to RSS's active "content-push" technology. RSS is also attrac- tive because of the growing problems of spam making e-mail content delivery extremely challenging. As the data is in XML, RSS information can be handled by a large number of devices. The strength of RSS is its simplicity and universality. It is exceptionally easy to syndicate and deliver site content using RSS; and it is also very easy for the users to read RSS data feeds. BACKGRound RSS is architecturally a distributed data network imple- mented using the XML standard (W3C, 2006). Contrary Figure 1. RSS network architectural model to traditional client-server model where data contents are contained in large centralized application servers, RSS has no central content repositories. RSS contents are totally distributed, not even existed as data bundles in a few servers, but as individual items in computers scattered all over the Internet. Users do not need to install complicated client programs to access RSS contents; a simple RSS reader will be able to gather the information and display them as Web pages. An RSS network is built on three major components: provider, aggregator and reader (Hammersley, 2005). The network has numerous content providers. They provide contents such as news articles with RSS files describing and containing these articles. The network is served by a smaller number of RSS aggregators. They read the RSS files from various content provid- ers, Web sources, collecting, indexing and providing customized "RSS feeds" of topic-specific contents to the readers. Reader application connects itself to an RSS aggregation. Based upon user input, contents are fed to the reader. Once the RSS feed is received, the user can select an item and view the information directly from the content provider (see Figure 1). RSS Content Aggregators Users Defined Filters File Harvesting Feed Retrieval RSS Content Providers Feed Request RSS Content Readers Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.