Urchin is a Web based, customisable, RSS aggregator and filter. It's primary purpose is to allow the generation of new RSS feeds by running queries against the collection of items in the Urchin database. However, other arbitrary output formats can be defined and generated using XSL transformations or HTML::Template templates.

In other words, the collection of Urchin Perl modules form a foundation for building an RSS aggregation or portal service.

Urchin also includes code to help administrators import RSS-like data from non-RSS sources. Currently there is code to create RSS objects using regular expression based scraping of text files or SQL queries to Perl DBI sources.

Urchin is written in Perl using, wherever possible, pre-existing Perl modules.