GeoRSS Weblog

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.