Slashgeo

Waves in the geospatial community regarding GeoRSS (previous story with the GeoRSS Buzz PR). Let's start with this nice Directions Mag article named GeoRSS fun, which discuss GeoRSS brilliantly. Then, there's the debate about the OGC wanting to "hijack" GeoRSS. You must read this Hobu blog entry and Allan Doyle comments. From the Hobu blog: "This post is about my concerns that the Open GIS Consortium's (OGC) seems to be attempting to subvert and subsume GeoRSS. [...] First, I don't think that GeoRSS ever asked to be an OGC standard. Second, the OGC white paper completely disregarded the Creative Commons license [...]" Meanwhile, the Geospatial Semantic Web details how to mix RDF/A with GeoRSS. There's also the related GeoLocateFox extension for Firefox (previous story).

Mapz lists several, and some new, geospatial-related Firefox extensions. From the first extension description: "First, let's talk about All Your Maps Are Belong To Us, developed by John Morrissey. "Translates URLs for other mapping sites to Google Maps." This extension automatically converts MapQuest links to Google Map links. Now, you've got to love that super-cool title. For example, this extension will automatically replace this MapQuest link with this Google Map link." Make sure you read related stories below for other extensions and don't hesitate to share new ones!

There a new standard in the work for a Uniform Resource Identifier for geographic locations named geoURI. The published their IETF Internet Draft. They even already released a Firefox extension which supports geoURIs. From their website: "A dedicated Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme for geographic locations would be independent from any protocol, usable by any software/data format that can handle generich URIs. Like a “mailto:” URI launches your favourite mail application today, a “geo:” URI could soon launch your favourite mapping service, or queue that location for a navigation device."

A friend sent me to the Geo microformat for WGS84 geographical coordinates in the works which should be supported natively by Firefox 3. This is related to the geoURI Scheme and the GeoClue project previously discussed. To understand this Geo microformat, read the wikipedia entry on microformats. From the Geo entry's introduction: "Geo is a microformat used for marking up WGS84 geographical coordinates (latitude;longitude) in (X)HTML. Although termed a "draft" specification, this is a formality, and the format is stable and in use; not least as a sub-set of the published hCalendar and hCard microformat specifications. Use of Geo allows parsing tools (for example other websites, or Firefox's Operator extension) to extract the locations, and display them using some other website or mapping tool, or to load them into a GPS device, index or aggregate them, or convert them into an alternative format. Version 3 of the Firefox browser is expected to include native support for microformats[1], including Geo."

There has been lot of words on the geoblogs on the new geolocation addon for Firefox named Geode. My prefered explanation comes from VerySpatial: "The most important, I think, is the discussion on the W3C geolocation standard and the fact that it is meant to be an API for grabbing device location information, not for storing. This means that the W3C standard is not meant to compete with existing data standards such as KML, GeoRSS, etc. Geode then is a tool that allows you to use wifi (aka Skyhook Wireless) location technologies to capture your location on sites that are location (Geode) enabled." From the official page: "It’s not just resturant lookups that location enables on the desktop. For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes it’s behavior appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, always actually local. Or a bank that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house." See also previous related stories below.