Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used byreal-time applications inpoint-to-point settings as well as on theWorld Wide Web. The latter is also calledweb feed. News feed is a popular form of web feed.RSS feed makes dissemination ofblogs easy.Product feeds play increasingly important role ine-commerce andinternet marketing, as well asnews distribution, international markets, andcybersecurity.[1] Data feeds usually require structured data that include different labelled fields, such as "title" or "product".
The Web is evolving into a web of data orSemantic Web.[citation needed] Data will be encoded by Semantic Web languages likeRDF orOWL according to many experts' visions. So, it is not difficult to envision data feeds will be also in the form of RDF or OWL. A big advantage of providing semantic data feeds, i.e. feeding data in Semantic Web standards, is that the data can then be readily consumed and reused by other computers.
CSV (Comma-separated values) data feeds are mostly being used withinaffiliate marketing. Affiliate or so called publisher websites use the CSV file to load product information from online stores. This way it is a lot easier to load thousands of products to the website. CSV is not structured like a document, asXML is, but it has a good layout for integration. Like XML, CSV format and semantics can be declared using validation languages.[2]
Most of these delimited file formats can easily be created and loaded with any spreadsheet program likeExcel.