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XML, data models, and DTDs
The structure and tag names in Moreover.com's XML feed form a "data model" of a news feed. Moreover.com thought about what it meant to be a news feed. It identified and gave a name to each piece of information, gave each item the name "article," and decided that its XML document would be an ordered list of articles. (The TSV version also represents a minimalist expression of the same conceptual data model.)

XML lets you express your data model in a Data Type Definition (DTD). In fact, Moreover.com provides the DTD for its XML news-feed documents. The DTD looks like this:

<!ELEMENT moreovernews (article*)>
<!ELEMENT article (url,headline_text,source,media_type,cluster,tagline,document_url,harvest_time,
access_registration,access_status)>
<!ATTLIST article id ID #IMPLIED>
<!ELEMENT url (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT headline_text (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT source (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT media_type (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT cluster (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT tagline (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT document_url (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT harvest_time (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT access_registration (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT access_status (#PCDATA)>


I won't go into the details of the DTD syntax, but basically, Moreover.com's DTD says that each of its news-feed documents (named "moreovernews") are composed of a set of zero or more "articles." Each article is composed of several pieces of information, including a "url," a "headline_text," and so on. In short, an XML DTD is a written definition of the abstract data model to which an XML document adheres.