Ach, late to the thread again. When I saw Google Sitemaps I also thought of RDF Site Summary, and did a sitemap2rss.xsl. But as noted already the role of RSS has mutated from site summary to a content delivery format, so it wasn't a very good fit. But it was straightforward to take their data and express it as RDF in a more natural fashion, see: http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/06/03/google-sitemap/
I think Atom could have been a good format for this purpose without the need for any other. I disagree with Walter, I believe the Sitemap terms are defined well enough to be reused. I've pasted that of priority below - it basically says where a crawler's resources are limited, URLs with a higher priority on a site should be crawled first/in preference to others on the site. That could be a nice like Atom extension. Cheers, Danny. ----- priority Definition Optional. The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. The default priority of a page is 0.5. Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index. Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites. -- http://dannyayers.com
