GeoRSS Weblog

Published GeoRSS feeds have been steadily increasing out there, but a new service launched this week potentially bumps up the number of GeoRSS feeds by an order of magnitude.

Geonames RSS to GeoRSS converter reads the entries of any RSS feed, and uses the Geonames database to determine any location referenced in the text. It then publishes a GeoRSS feed in the flavor of your choosing, for subscription or visualization.

Geographic search on regular text is a notoriously hard problem; pity the poor folks of London, Ontario. And this is far from the first attempt at it: there are whole companies hard at work, and many a web project like the 2002 Google Programming Contest Winner and mappr geosearch for flickr. Geonames is distinguished by a database built entirely from collected public domain geodata, made editable in a Wikipedia like fashion, and bridges to GeoRSS: Geonames has also released the GeoRSS library for Java.