GeoRSS Weblog

OpenLayers, the free and open-source dynamic map viewer, now natively supports layering GeoRSS feeds.

Give it a try, an example feed might be the Platial places tagged with snowboards: http://platial.com/rss/tag/snowboard

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.

SPARQL is a query language for RDF documents, with parallels to SQL for databases. Leigh Dodds has been working on SPARQL functions to query RDF documents containing GeoRSS .. SPARQL geo extensions. Right now, there’s functions to calculate the distance between two geotagged RDF nodes and search RDF documents for nodes within a bounding box. Could lead to some interesting uses!

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.

The recent news about Community Mapbuilder’s 1.0 release reminded me that way back in January Pat Cappelaere said that Mapbuilder will support GeoRSS “on the client side on the upcoming 1.0 release (both atom and RSS formats).”

Try it out and let us know how it goes.

ROME is an open source (Apache license) set of Atom/RSS Java utilities that make it easy to work in Java with most syndication formats.

The GeoRSS module for rome currently supports points in GeoRSS Simple format, W3CGeo and GeoRSS GML format.

This from Cadcorp:

We will be releasing a Plug-in, and an updated version of our free Map Browser OGC W*S client that can use it, sometime soon. The Plug-in supports: Simple and GML profiles; point, line and polygon geometries; and the various RSS encodings.

worldKit is an easy to use and flexible mapping application for the Web. Light weight GIS. It’s a SWF based app, configured by XML, data fed by RSS. Stand-alone use or integration in larger projects.