GeoRSS Weblog

Safe Software, makers of FME, a professional GIS tool for transforming and translating geodata formats have announced support for GeoRSS. And it’s very comprehensive .. for reading, writing, all the various flavors, and a thorough introduction for FME users. They’ve even shown quick demos on Mapufacture and mylocalguru. Check it out. Well done.

FME has supported development of GDAL/OGR in the past. So maybe GeoRSS support there is coming too?

Thanks to All Points Blog for the tip. And while GeoRSS may not be “approved”, we definitely think it’s “safe”.

Yahoo! Research Berkeley is datamining the 10 million+ geotagged flickr photos (all available in GeoRSS btw), and particularly deriving meaning from the association of geotags and folksonomic tags. Particular words become associated with particular places, and that’s interesting and potentially useful. Yahoo explains it better.

How’s this new development relate to GeoRSS? The World Explorer data is available through an API which returns GeoRSS. And the TagMaps visualization tool reads data in GeoRSS. A nice input output cycle of GeoRSS.

Interestingly, this touches on a recent GeoRSS list discussion on how to apply styling to GeoRSS. Though we concluded that GeoRSS should focus on data without styling, I did note the worldKit associates different styling options (like color, size, and opacity) with the field. Similarly, TagMaps uses the category to set the size of each tag. So, a potentially useful “in the wild” convention.

I’ve written up some critical feedback of the new-ish GeoRSS features Yahoo introduced in September.
The short of it: Polylines and Export are great. But we’d like to see Yahoo support and default recommend GeoRSS Simple and GeoRSS GML.

Loads of GeoRSS developments this week .. only just keeping up!

• Map24 GeoRSS Service provides a basic implementation of GeoRSS Simple visualization. via All Points Blog
• The Hindu Newspaper devotes a column to GeoRSS. via All Points Blog
• OgleEarth suggests integration opportunties for Google Earth, and GeoRSS pops up a bunch of times.

National Geographic has a new story about using GeoRSS: Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds.

In particular, it covers how GeoRSS can enable environment monitoring and notifications.

Note: it should be Raj Singh, not Ray Singh.

Aaron Roller of Motionbased (a cool subsidiary of Garmin) has written a very good, critical post on GeoRSS. They have just added GeoRSS feeds to Motionbased, which is great, but he has found the variations of GeoRSS confusing and frustrating. He illustrates the point with an example RSS item containing four different GeoRSS Point flavors — Simple, GML, W3C “formal” (contained with a <geo:Point>) and “casual”.

This is the most common complaint with GeoRSS, both from developers working with the format and even the wide group of people who have developed it. The last thing we want is to fracture GeoRSS in the same the RSS has been.

There are two main points I think GeoRSS.org needs to get across. First, publishers should not carry the burden of publishing in all the various flavors. Pick either Simple or GML, whatever is more appropriate for your application, and stick with that. Consumer and aggregators will be able to handle what you throw at them. Second, the W3C is aiming to resolve the differences with GeoRSS and the Geo Vocabulary with the Geospatial Incubator Group. This work should provide more clarity to the web at large.

Aaron also mentions “people at Where 2.0 were harrassing Google as if they are some sort of monster sticking to a proprietary format”. That’s me . Well I will definitely admit to some pokes and prods (like MGeoRSS, which I’ve just updated to support GeoRSS Simple Points), but with good intentions. I believe Google has everything to gain by supporting GeoRSS as Yahoo, Microsoft, ESRI, Garmin (through MotionBased), and myriads of others, are making moves to do. KML is great, but I think GeoRSS fits a different need, and really does excel through open development.

In a press release today, ESRI announced support for GeoRSS in their new ArcWeb Services JavaScript API. Welcome to Web 2.0 ESRI!

A request from the owner:
http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/05/geotaggerscom_a.html

As a lot of the GeoRSS site’s content administrators are Mac users, and we use Subversion to manage our content, I wanted to highlight this Subversion screencast. Don’t know about you, but I know I’ve been having a devil of a time getting a nice Subversion workflow going on my system.

We’ve added some new categories to the site. Things like “Software”, “Content/Feed”, etc. so we can easily post entries pointing to these kinds of things. We’ll be migrating the content from the GeoRSS Implementations page to here.