Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• What is an RSS Feed?

• How to add RSS Feeds to COSMOS?

Objectives

• Adding RSS Feeds to COSMOS.

Lesson

What is an RSS Feed?

• An RSS Feeds is a technology that allows users to access updates to the website in a computer-readable format.
• Websites which publish episodes, news, blog posts or episodes of video series use RSS Feeds.
• With RSS Feeds, users do not need to check websites manually for new content.
• Further information can be found by following the links below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#:~:text=RSS%20(RDF%20Site%20Summary%20or,in%20a%20single%20news%20aggregator.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-an-rss-feed/

Once COSMOS is launched in your browser, click the plus button on the top left corner. There are options Import Data, Import RSS Feed and Start Twitter Collection. We will importing an RSS Feed on COSMOS:

1. Click Import RSS Feed and the popup window appears on the page.
2. Then, find the RSS Feed URL of the website and copy and paste it to the form.
3. Name the dataset and write a description by filling-in the form on the popup window.
4. After filling-in the form, just hit the import button.
5. It appears on the Show Panel and is ready to drag and drop onto the workspace.

Tip: How to find the RSS Feed URL of a site?

There are several ways to find the RSS Feed URL of a website. You can find out the ways and instructions clicking this link.

You can also watch a YouTube video showing all COSMOS adding RSS feed processes by clicking the image below.

Challenge 1

Find the RSS Feed URLs for the following websites and start a collection using COSMOS:

• BBC Sport
• New York Times Home Page

Solution to challenge 1

• https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/sport/rss.xml
• https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

Key Points

• COSMOS allows us to collect data from a variety of websites using an RSS Feed.

• COSMOS can collect RSS Feeds from multiple websites.