GeoRSS Weblog

A couple of months ago, Yahoo! released the beta of their location brokering service, FireEagle. The service just recently came out of private beta and is now open to anyone to store and retrieve their current location.

One feature that was purposefully (so far) left out of FireEagle was getting a location history. Queries only return a unique XML markup of the user’s current location.

EagleFeed is a simple solution to this - it’s sole feature is providing a GeoRSS feed of your FireEagle location.

Since FireEagle allows a user to specify their location accuracy per application - you can choose to just provide a city or neighborhood level response to EagleFeed - making it a nice, variable granularity, location tracker.

Personally, I use it in my blog to provide a small badge on my location. Using SimplePie, a PHP RSS parser, I can easily pull in my location and do caching without having to deal with the complexities of OAuth for just a simple widget.

I’ve never really got into the whole Twittering thing, but I’m sure this will be of interest to some. I just came across GeoTwitter, which is an open source .NET code base that does what you think. Start here with the background details.

I was pleasantly amazed to find out that Apple’s DashCode includes a Project Template for building a “Maps Widget” that handles GeoRSS feeds and KML documents.

If you’re not familiar with them, Apple Mac OS X provides Dashboard Widgets - which are small HTML and Javascript enabled windows that can quickly display information such as sports scores, travel information, stocks, and thousands of other applications. Apple’s recently released update to their operating system, Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, includes the final version of DashCode. DashCode is a development environment for building these widgets.

Building a Map Widget is simple: select the project, add a GeoRSS or KML URL, get a GoogleMaps API Key (confusing because Google requests a URL, which isn’t actually used by the widget), Save it and you’re done - near instant Map Widget.

minimap is a Firefox extension that adds a very feature rich geo-sidebar to your Firefox browser (also available as a Flock plugin).

The extension offers incredible integration with online mapping and search services. When you first open the extension, you see a Google Map to which you can add locations or just explore. You can also drag and drop addresses, plain text or Microformats - minimap also offers Operator support - which show up on your map as saved locations. At any of these locations you can get directions, view in other mapping services, find books or services at the location, or general local search Google, Platial, Tagzania, and hopefully more soon via OpenSearch-geo.

The newest release, 0.1.4.7, adds GeoRSS and KML support. You can drag and drop (or use the menus to add) any GeoRSS or KML link and the markers will show up in the sidebar map.

So now you can view your feeds from services like Mapufacture or your Yahoo Pipes mashups within your browser and mix it with content you’re viewing on a site.

Dan Karran has been busy adding GeoRSS & KML support to Drupal 5.

He’s looking for feedback on bugs and additional features - so give it a try and let him know.

Midgard, a very full-featured CMS that is being used to replace Maemo.org has added a lot of functionality for supporting publishing & consuming GeoRSS.

Check out the Midgard’s Position module which uses a very nice PHP geographic position library. Midgard also uses RSSCreator with some geo modifications.

You can see an example of a GeoCMS built using Midgard by checking out the DeathMonkey motor cycle tour site.

Schuyler Erle announced today a new release candidate for the open-source javascript mapping library, OpenLayers. This new version adds support for displaying GeoRSS Atom Simple points. This feature was added by Sean Gilles.

Using this feature, displaying GeoRSS is as simple as adding a new layer to an OpenLayers map. All current points in the GeoRSS feed are then displayed as markers with the item description in the marker popup. consuming GeoRSS doesn’t get much simpler.

See the Release Notes for more notes and added features.

[Update: Fixed spelling of Schuyler’s name]

The content management system Drupal now has the ability to consume and produce GeoRSS.

Dan Karran released a GeoRSS module that plugs into Drupal. He also developed a plugin that supports KML for use in GoogleEarth. These modules are part of a Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) demonstration system.

This project is very exciting as it is an excellent demonstration of large sites using Content Management Systems the benefits and ease of sharing and producing geospatial information.

Find out more about the plugin, and download it, from the Drupal site.

Seen on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog…

Mikel has combined Kiva.org’s RSS feed of loan applications and some GeoNames services to generate GeoRSS which he then plots on a Mapufacture map.

Adena at AllPoints noted that MapInfo will be supporting GeoRSS. The original article is at GISCafe Weekly.

Once again, no indication of which flavor they will be using. That’s something we still have to sort out.