BRIGHTi GeoFeeder

September 22nd, 2007

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?

Posted by mikel Filed in General

5 Responses to “BRIGHTi GeoFeeder”

  1. mapbutcher Says:
    September 22nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    Hi Mikel,

    I’m in the process of putting together a free extension for ArcGIS to enable ESRI users to maintain GeoRSS feeds , I’ve already written a flat exporter, but as it stands its pretty useless if you want to keep your feed up to date whilst normally editing your data. The new extenstion will allow users of ArcGIS to automatically maintain feeds as part of their day to day editing.

    I’m at FOSS4G would be good to catch up..

    Cheers

    Simon

  2. Dale Lutz Says:
    September 23rd, 2007 at 12:29 am

    Hi Mikel,

    Just by way of clarification, FME uses GDAL/OGR but I wouldn’t say its built on it, FME definitely isn’t open source, and our users tell us it *is* easy to work with. (I suspect you may have missed some punctuation and meant that GDAL/OGR are open source, which they most definitely are.)

    In case anyone is interested, Jason Birch wrote up a nice story about how he used FME to publish some data in GeoRSS from his city’s construction building permits here: http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2007/03/26/73/georss-fme-rocks-my-world-again/

    Thanks, I’m at FOSS4G as well hopefully we’ll all meet up and talk some GeoRSS….

    Dale

  3. Sean Gillies Says:
    September 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 am

    The lesson here: press release spam really works. These folks even posted to the freegis list in blatant disregard to its charter. Boo.

  4. Mikel Says:
    September 23rd, 2007 at 8:13 pm

    Dale — sorry for any confusion there, just typing too quickly. My attempted point was that there’s a variety of tools, each with a different target audience. Safe’s support of GeoRSS is great, as I blogged before..
    http://georss.org/blog/2007/02/09/safe-software-supports-georss/

    Sean — I gave some promotion to GeoFeeder because it focuses so tightly on GeoRSS, which is quite unique.

  5. Dave Sampson Says:
    October 20th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    Just as something else to consider. The easiest web services tool I have ever used is geoserver.org . if you have data as shape, postgis or SDE (and others) then use this puppy to get the following outputs

    WMS
    WFS
    WFS-T
    GML
    KML
    GeoRSS

    Open source, Open Standards…. lets keep geo data open folks.

    Cheers

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