GeoRSS Weblog

A common question that comes up with someone first looking at the GeoRSS draft is why there is a space separator in the point field and not a comma, or other marker.

<georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>

Marc, of GeoNames succinctly answers:

The space as a separator is more robust and less error prone. In many
countries the comma is used as the decimal separator and there will be
many feeds with commas as the decimal separator. Using space as the
separator, it is possible to write a GeoRSS parser able to deal with
wrong input.

The Geospatial Semantic Weblog has a quick howto on mixing RDF/A with GeoRSS in a webpage.


<span about="http://highearthorbit.com" property="georss:point">42.4266 -83.4931</span>


The premise of RDF/A is the ability to embed metadata without having to repeat the information in the normal expression and the XML expression. By using GeoRSS the property of the information being displayed in the HTML page can also be semantically linked to any other metadata in the page referencing http://highearthorbit.com.

For a counter-example, look at the Microformats: geo that requires duplicating the data, but also allows for a different display of the actual data.

Directions Magazine has a short post on the shift from making mashups to making tools for mashups. The premise is that lots of cutting-edge developers have led the way and developed mashups. However, as with most technology, there is a slow, but subtle and necessary shift from “doing-for-doings sake” to “doing-for-something-useful”, which means the tools have to be simpler and more widely used.

The article mentions GeoRSS, which is a technology standard that enables anyone to easily publish geo-data, which other services can then consume to produce mashups for people. Imagine online development tools like Ning having a drop in module that can consume GeoRSS and then pipe this to a map or SMS users. Then any site that publishes in GeoRSS (real estate, events, restaurant deals, etc.) can be “mashed up” without the user having to do any real programming.

Version 3 of the Virtual Earth Map Control has been released, with support for GeoRSS. Great news!

Quick data-binding for GeoRSS – Now, you can quickly and simply bind data to pushpins using the standard data format GeoRSS. Just point the control at your GeoRSS file or service and it will automatically manage the process of creating pushpins and pop-ups.

Read more about the release on the Virtual Earth Developer Blog.

You can now read the XTech 2006 paper, GeoRSS : Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS Feeds, written by Mikel Maron. It gives a good and short introduction and overview of the GeoRSS ideas and implementations.

I definitely recommend it if you’re new to GeoRSS or want a little bit of inspiration and insight as to why it’s such a great development.

Our own Mikel Maron recently announced his GeoRSS aggregator, Mapufacture.

Mapufacture provides a nice, simple, graphical interface for defining your “area of interest” by zooming in on a GoogleMap. After selecting your area, and creating the map name and description, you can then add feeds to the map.

Other unique features of Mapufacture include keyword search and search by area. When you search by keyword, however, the search results don’t give you an actual listing of the items (or count), or the search term used. Simple additions that I’m sure will show up quickly.

Any searches or maps can in fact be aggregated (unlike many other so-called “aggregators”), by using the supplied RSS output icon in a Mapufacture search.

Unlike Placedb, each of the feeds must use the GeoRSS specification. However, at this time it’s not clear what flavors of GeoRSS Mapufacture supports (Mikel?).

Another great GeoRSS aggregator by one of the major supporters and developers of the GeoRSS spec. Hopefully this drives further incorporation of geographic data into feeds.

PlaceDB is another GeoRSS aggregation site which also geocodes news feeds. It uses the Geonames site to do the geocoding and is sponsored by Platial.

PlaceDB: Detroit Metro Area News

Presumably they’ve already built up a list of over 1750 feeds aggregated together, although viewing the feeds seems to show some problems. In addition, the UI requires some serious work to find your lat/lon and bounds.

But it is still a great little utility for getting local news and GeoRSS feeds.

Chris Holmes’ posting of a few weeks ago has generated some recent comments. Chris originally talked about having mashups output GeoRSS so it would be possible to subscribe to new information from the mashup. That led to some comments, most recently about the potential to use GeoRSS as a datastore and the idea of using GeoRSS in a transactional WFS.

Things are moving so fast with GeoRSS, we thought we could use a weblog to communicate with the wider community, for nuggets like new support of the format, tips, background and thoughts on the technicals, event announcements. Here it is!

For instance, the Platial social mapping site just announced support. In this space, they join competitior Tagzania, which publishes W3C GeoRSS for all of their maps. Seems they’re only a few steps away from a global, open database of collaborative geo annotations.

This is MIT shown on a Yahoo map. To do this we’re using a WordPress plugin called GeoPress. So far it geocodes points, but we’ve got big plans to develop full GeoRSS support into it. Also note that the version on the web site currently outputs W3C Geo. The modded version I’m running outputs GeoRSS like this.