We haven’t really promoted this widely, but we have an OPML file that contains a list of RSS feeds of institutions that publish catalog entries of their OCW courses to RSS.

Gibberish? Read no further. Code jockeys, on the other hand, follow me…

Here’s the link to the OPML:

http://www.oeconsortium.org/feeds/ocwcmemberfeeds.opml

The entries in the OPML file represent institutional course feeds. Here’s a snippet:


<outline type="rss"Â title="University of Notre Dame" text="University of Notre Dame" url="http://ocw.nd.edu/courselist/rss"/>
<outline type="rss"Â title="United Nations University" text="United Nations University" url="http://ocw.unu.edu/rss_all"/>
<outline type="rss"Â title="Keio University" text="Keio University" url="http://ocw.dmc.keio.ac.jp/KeioOCW_rss20.xml"/>


Once you get down to the individual feeds, and pull, say the feed for Notre Dame, the format for items looks like this:


<item rdf:about="http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1">
<title>Nature and the Built Environment</title>
<link>http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1</link>
<description>This course explores the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment. While grounded in scientific evidence, a broad perspective of humanism is emphasized throughout, with discussions of how ideas, beliefs, experience, ideals, and human nature animate individuals and societies and thereby give form to the things they make. </description>
<cc:license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/"/>
<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Nature and the Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Art</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Nature</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Ancient Greece</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Architecture</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:subject>
<dc:contributor>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Norman Crowe</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Paul Monson</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:contributor>
<dc:date>2008-11-24T18:28:17Z</dc:date>
<dc:type>Course</dc:type>
<dc:format>text/html</dc:format>
</item>

We don’t have entries for every OCW course (because we don’t have feeds for many institutions). Still if you drill down from that OPML into all the individual feeds, there’s something like 3,300 courses represented, complete with subject tags.

Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems like this is ripe for a mashup. Clay’s already written a wonderful OCW search application using these feeds. But I’m sure there are other opportunities. Maybe a bookmarklet, ala Library Lookup? Google home page widget? Heck, I don’t know. Half the point of openness is the people sitting on the data don’t have any idea of some of its potential applications, and you can count me in on that group.

I should note once again this is just the subset of institutions from which we’ve gotten feeds. But more applications means more incentive for people to submit feeds — so if you do something interesting with it, let us know.