Searching Web Feeds from a Functional Database Management System

Abstract: Web feeds are a popular technique to distribute information about contents of web pages. RSS and Atom are two standards used to syndicate web contents as web feeds. This project investigates how to make different kinds of Internet web feeds searchable by implementing a general wrapper for web feeds in an extensible and functional DBMS, Amos II. The system, RSS-Amos, makes it possible to search the contents of any RSS or Atom based web feed using the query language AmosQL. New web feeds simply have to be declared to the system in order to make them searchable. The system guarantees that added feeds always are up to date when queries are made. The wrapper is implemented in Java using the ROME API from java.net. The project includes an evaluation of the performance of the system. Due to the fact that the actual data sources are located on the Internet, a cache of read feeds has been implemented to improve performance. The cache makes queries over 150 times faster.