GeoRSS Weblog

Sorry for the long delay in getting the GeoRSS site back up. We had an unforseen (as they tend to be) loss of the original host, and recovering the data led to problems. But thanks to the heroic efforts of many, the site is restored on a new host (and backups).

We’ll be updating the content of the site soon to make it easier to introduce GeoRSS to visitors, and also make finding examples, answers to questions, and links to upcoming changes easier.

I need some pretty basic GeoRSS GML export functionality from ArcMap. Beta quality is fine. Has anyone done this or can it be whipped up in a week? I’d be happy to take a stab at maintaining it as open source, but there’s always ArcScripts for this as well.

Who would’ve imagined the day when GeoRSS is part of the job description.

Domain expertise in GIS, photogrammetry and geospatial service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies (WMS, WFS, geoRSS) is highly desirable.

After discussion in the GeoRSS community, and based on feedback of consistency across pages, we’ve migrated the GeoRSS site to a Drupal-based CMS. Also, if you walk in web-design rings, you may know that May 1st is CSSReboot.

What does this mean to you? First, the pages will be much easier to maintain for accuracy and consistency. It will also allow people to add more examples, link to software, use cases, and clarify any issues.

We’re also encouraging the GeoRSS community to maintain an active commitment in supporting and developing the standard. If you have a request or desire for GeoRSS, create a proposal and elicit feedback. We’ll be putting up votes on proposals as they begin to solidify and find general community consensus.

Why Drupal? For one, it’s easy to setup and maintain. But more importantly, Drupal has gotten excellent geospatial modules, especially GeoRSS support (and KML) both for importing (incoming RSS feed entries can become first-class citizens in your CMS) as well as output (publish GeoRSS from your CMS) through the hard work of Dan Karran. We wanted to support that effort by showcasing it on georss.org.

Please let us know what you think, if you find any orphaned-pages or dead-links, and create an account and join the community.

Since Google’s and Microsoft’s GeoRSS announcements last month, there’s been a big jump in interest. Just look at the GeoRSS hits graph from Technorati.

Well more than anyone here can keep up with. One thing that’s jumped out at me is that among the recent batch of Google Summer of Code 2007 project approvals, there’s three projects focused on GeoRSS!

Geo-component for Joomla! Mickael Maison will add GeoRSS and KML support to the Joomla! CMS.

Sahana GIS Catalogue Administration Module Mifan Careem will build out GeoRSS and WMS services for Sahana, the inspiring open source disaster management system.

Implementation of An Interactive GeoRSS tool in uDig Rui Li will be adding GeoRSS authoring to uDig, an OSGeo project.

Congrats to the students .. have an awesome summer!

Jason Birch has a nice little tutorial on building a GeoRSS feed to show current housing starts with a feed of new construction building permits. He’s using Safe Software’s FME, but even if you don’t have that, he also shows the output on Google Reader and Google Maps. Very nice!

Announced on the Google Maps Blog, GeoRSS, in all its glory, is now supported by Google Maps. Support for KML has been vastly improved too.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be said, this is a big big deal for GeoRSS. We now have support across all three major web map apis, and a common language for geospatial web.

There are some samples on the GMaps blog. Here’s another. Hmm, the documentation example itself isn’t working; that one is requesting a flickr GeoRSS feed .. perhaps Y is throttling, as Google will need to proxy all GeoRSS API requests through its own servers.

Anyway, now looking forward to GeoRSS in Google Earth. But not before a little celebration. Congrats all and cheers Google!

This article in Information Week on map mashups in business highlights GeoRSS, and illustrates with a mashup created by BP of their assets in the Gulf of Mexico post-Katrina, apparently using some GeoRSS feeds.

Yahoo Pipes, the new RSS remix and mashup programming environment from Yahoo has made a stunning debut. I’ve used Ray Ozzie’s quote “RSS is the Unix Pipe of the Internet” in my presentations on GeoRSS, and Pipes is a big step towards realizing that idea .. this kind of leveraging of RSS is exactly the reason why it’s a good idea to package up geography in GeoRSS.

And GeoRSS is pretty central to the new service. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest deconstructs a location based pipe. Chris Schmidt has added GeoRSS output to MetaCarta Web Services to integrate with the Pipes system.

I’ve made some experiments with Pipes, and reported them on my weblog. There are still a lot of rough patches, see the section on GeoRSS in my blog post for some specific bugs and gotchas. But it’s a promising start and the developers seem to be listening closely to feedback, so feel encouraged to have a try.

For those who know what a coordinate reference system (CRS) is, move along to the next paragraph. But for the curious, here’s a quick lesson in coordinate reference systems. The one everyone knows is that used by Global Positioning System satellites, which uses latitude and longitude coordinates expressed in decimal degrees and tied to the reference system and model of the shape of the earth known as WGS84. This is the default CRS for GeoRSS. It works OK for a global standard, but the accuracy is only plus or minus a meter, which just doesn’t cut it when you’re building a bridge or surveying property lines. So engineers often use CRSes that are accurate to inches or better, using models that maximize accuracy for one small part of the world, but are worse than even WGS84 when you move to other areas.

GeoRSS GML has always supported CRSes other than WGS84 lat/lon (which is the default for both GeoRSS Simple and GML), but until now we’ve been extremely lazy and haven’t had any examples of how to specify a CRS. Guilt has overcome laziness finally and I’ve gotten one example posted here (ignore the fact that the coordinates don’t make sense for CRS urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG:6.6:26986, which by the way is Massachusetts Mainland Stateplane meters–maybe I’ll fix that by 2008).