Import items from a feed?

Hi folks,
I'm using crowdmap.com to crowdsource local knowledge about cultural heritage. Crowdmap will send out alerts via email whenever new reports are created. I'm wondering if there's a more or less automatic way to have Omeka pick those emails up and create a unique item from them. Crowdmap also has a feed from its alerts page, which I suppose could work. That should be fairly straightforward, I'd assume?

Many thanks

Well, Omeka runs on Zend Framework, which does contain some components that should make it pretty easy to work with feeds (see Zend_Feed).

The issue comes with the "more or less automatic" part. It'd be somewhat easy to make something like this that would work only when you press a button or something in the admin interface. You could write something that would poll the feed for updates and automatically get them, but that would require some server setup (probably a cron job).

Whatever you do, you'd need a table or some other storage to keep track of what items you've read from the feed already, or you could just keep track of the last time you read from the feed and only get items newer than that date.

Long story short, it's doable and fairly straightforward, but I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it easy.