GeoRSS Weblog

The Canadian Government proposes using GeoRSS for emergency notification in their Architecture for Situational Awareness Systems. The US-centric Environmental Information Exchange Network is also considering GeoRSS to expand their spatial data smarts beyond points.

A couple of months ago, Yahoo! released the beta of their location brokering service, FireEagle. The service just recently came out of private beta and is now open to anyone to store and retrieve their current location.

One feature that was purposefully (so far) left out of FireEagle was getting a location history. Queries only return a unique XML markup of the user’s current location.

EagleFeed is a simple solution to this - it’s sole feature is providing a GeoRSS feed of your FireEagle location.

Since FireEagle allows a user to specify their location accuracy per application - you can choose to just provide a city or neighborhood level response to EagleFeed - making it a nice, variable granularity, location tracker.

Personally, I use it in my blog to provide a small badge on my location. Using SimplePie, a PHP RSS parser, I can easily pull in my location and do caching without having to deal with the complexities of OAuth for just a simple widget.

I’ve never really got into the whole Twittering thing, but I’m sure this will be of interest to some. I just came across GeoTwitter, which is an open source .NET code base that does what you think. Start here with the background details.

In what appears to be the first use of “GeoRSS” in a book title, there is an upcoming book “Practical Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets, GeoRSS and KML”. The book won’t be published until this September, and isn’t yet listed on the Apress site, but you can see the Amazon listing here.

While this is the first title that includes “GeoRSS”, searching across Amazon shows 22 results when searching for term “GeoRSS”. Google Book Search shows 90 results. However, it doesn’t appear to have a way to return the number of unique results, so my book shows up twice, and Google Maps Hacks has the English and Japanese versions.

Looking over the categories of books that mention GeoRSS, there is a very good selection. The most prevalent, and obvious, are mashup and programming books. There is a Mac OS X Leopard book, assumedly referring to the included Dashboard widget. There are a number of surprising (and incorrect) results, such as “A Unsocial Socialist”, which is actually an incorrect OCR for “George”.

Joey Tracker is a nice little app for tracking the Tufts University shuttle bus. They’re running a real time tracking system from Ublip, and receiving updates on the location of the bus via GeoRSS, and mapping that with GMaps API. Nice.

InSTEDD is an “NGO Startup” formed by Larry Brilliant in 2006, focused on building and distributing innovative technology for humanitarian response. Dr. Brilliant is now the head of Google.org, which provided seed funding for the organization. InSTEDD emerged from a year of relative quiet, releasing some simple and elegant tools. Their approach so far appears to be reuse of the best of Web 2.0 for humanitarian response.

SMS Geo-Chat builds location based chat on top of SMS, with visualization in Google Earth, and wider distribution of data with GeoRSS (hence the posting here). This is developed further in Contacts Nearby, which leverages the multi-modal communication of Twitter and the social network of Facebook.

If this sounds just a little like TwitterVision, it’s not surprising, I reckon the influence is there and that’s a very good thing; the innovation and ideas in this field are out there, and what’s really needed is a channel to get the clever hacks into the hands of responders. We’ve discussed and worked with GeoRSS for disaster response for a couple years (National Geographic had a good summary in 2006). There’s been discussions of Twitter in dsiaster response since it’s launch; SMS is the last communication channel to go down in an emergency, and the first to come back up. And Twitter is multi-modal, easily connecting SMS potentially to any other channel. These ideas had a good workout during the San Diego fires.

Just a couple critiques. The format they used to encode location in Twitter is “lat*lon*message”; rather than the nanoformats (”l:lat,lon”) used in TwitterVision and Bangladesh Boat Journey. I think nanoformats are potentially more flexible and already being used, so why invent a new format. Also, I’m not sure why they chose ASP.net to code their projects in — are most humanitarian response organizations running msft products? Or is it because some of the core team come from Microsoft? Hopefully there’s scope for full open source solutions in the future.

Chris Holmes gives a good rant about being a good GeoRSS citizen.

I was pleasantly amazed to find out that Apple’s DashCode includes a Project Template for building a “Maps Widget” that handles GeoRSS feeds and KML documents.

If you’re not familiar with them, Apple Mac OS X provides Dashboard Widgets - which are small HTML and Javascript enabled windows that can quickly display information such as sports scores, travel information, stocks, and thousands of other applications. Apple’s recently released update to their operating system, Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, includes the final version of DashCode. DashCode is a development environment for building these widgets.

Building a Map Widget is simple: select the project, add a GeoRSS or KML URL, get a GoogleMaps API Key (confusing because Google requests a URL, which isn’t actually used by the widget), Save it and you’re done - near instant Map Widget.

Andres has declared today Let Others Know about RSS Day. It may not roll off the tongue, but I think you know what to do .. if you’ve seen the light of GeoRSS, pass it on and evangelise the greatness of RSS and GeoRSS to your uninitiated colleagues.

The nice thing is that enlightenment is usually quick, it takes only two minutes to explain what it’s all about!

GeoFeeder is a new tool making it very easy to convert proprietary and/or complicated GIS formats into GeoRSS. I don’t think there’s an simpler way to transform a ShapeFile into GeoRSS, which in the words of the GeoFeeder site is “the current defacto standard for web mapping”. It’s really cool to see a tool so clearly target GeoRSS.

There are other tools which do the same — notably Safe’s FME, which does support many more formats, including raster, but at a comparable increase in price. FME is built on gdal/ogr, open source and comparably more difficult to work with, and not yet supporting GeoRSS .. maybe we can do something about that at FOSS4G next week?