Agilent Laboratories Technical Report Copyright © 2005 Agilent Technologies, Inc. 1 NRSS: A Protocol for Syndicating Numeric Data Jerry Liu, Glen Purdy, Jay Warrior, Glenn Engel Communications Solutions Department Agilent Laboratories Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA {jerry_liu, glen_purdy, jay_warrior, glenn_engel}@agilent.com April 2005 Abstract This paper proposes NRSS (Numeric Really Simple Syndication), a protocol for syndicating numeric data over the web. It builds upon RSS (Really Simple Syndication) version 2.0, a popular protocol used to syndicate headlines for news stories around the web, and the data model from IEEE 1451.1, a standard for representing and describing numeric measurement data. This note provides an overview to NRSS and outlines some possible usage scenarios. It also describes how NRSS extends regular RSS and illustrates how a NRSS numeric summary feed can be constructed via some examples. 1. Introduction NRSS is a protocol for syndicating numerical data over the web. These numeric contents include examples such as the temperature of a pond, the price of Agilent Technologies stock, or the spin-up time of a disk drive. It is an extension of the popular protocol Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Version 2.0 specifications [1]. RSS is used for news web sites like CNN.com to syndicate the headlines of textual files, such as news stories, to other web sites. The process works as follows. An RSS client gets a news feed from CNN.com based on RSS, meaning that it queries and receives from the CNN.com server a summary of the news articles available on CNN.com, along with links to the actual news story. If a reader is interested in one or more of the headlines, he can then follow the links in the news summary to retrieve the entire news story file via traditional means. The intended use of the RSS protocol is for a news reader to retrieve news summaries from various news sites without needing to browse through the sites to retrieve entire files just to get a summary. Many RSS clients exist today, and most popular news sites, as well as a growing number of smaller sites, provide RSS news feeds for the contents that exist on their site. In this paper, we propose NRSS, an extension of numeric, rather than textual, data model onto the basic RSS protocol and describe how the different attributes needed to transfer numeric data transfer can be mapped onto RSS. In the same way that RSS is used to retrieve headlines of news stories, NRSS can be used to retrieve the highlights of a particular numerical data source, as well as the associated information to make sense of the numerical data and links to retrieve all or portions of the original data set. The version of the RSS specification used in this note is RSS 2.0 available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss With this mapping based on RSS, when a numeric data consumer retrieves a NRSS Numeric Summary from a Data Set provider, it can:  Discover the identities of the numeric data sets available on the server.  Retrieve a description and latest values from the numeric data set.