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GeoRSS: The Simplest Possible "Geo" for the Web

posted by Satri on Wednesday July 12, @10:52AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the future-in-RSS-pro-and-simple dept.
Open Geospatial Consortium Technology
Here's an informative article hosted on GeoPlace written by Raj Singh, director of Interoperability Programs at the Open Geospatial Consortium, named GeoRSS: The Simplest Possible “Geo” for the Web. From the article: "GeoRSS developers are hoping that big players like Yahoo and Microsoft will soon provide GeoRSS support. The Internet and the Web are built on standards, and GeoRSS, particularly the Pro version, offers an elemental standards platform that will enable applications to exploit reliable, publicly available, data rich services and content. These might be proprietary or non-proprietary, but if they support the Pro version of GeoRSS, they will maximize the “network effect” of growing value that comes with large-scale, open systems. The High Earth Orbit blog adds GeoRSS support to Ruby on Rails mapping.

Related Stories

Industry: GeoRSS support in Cadcorp SIS 6.2 [+]
gisarch writes "From Directions Magazine, GIS developer Cadcorp has released three new plugins for interoperability with XML based data source. Of particular note is Cadcorp SIS supporting GeoRSS. "The next service pack release of Cadcorp SIS V6.2 will include a version of the free Map Browser product that will be able to use the GeoRSS plug-in. This will enable Map Browser users to load GeoRSS ‘feeds’ and to combine them with Open Geospatial Consortium W*S services." "GeoRSS, which is supported by the OGC, is a simple extension to RSS feeds to describe the location of the information in geographic coordinates. As RSS becomes more prevalent as a means of publishing and sharing information, GeoRSS is expected to become increasingly important in enabling applications to request, aggregate and share geographically tagged feeds.""
Industry: Safe to Support GeoRSS [+]
All Points Blog shares the good news that Safe Software, makers of FME, will support GeoRSS in their next release. From the press release: "FME's GeoRSS reader and writer support both RSS and Atom feeds, and all of the three current GeoRSS standards for encoding geographical data in a feed: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Geo, GeoRSS Simple and GeoRSS GML Profile. Using FME's GeoRSS reader, regularly updated information provided by any geo-tagged feed becomes just another data source to FME, enabling users to work with the data quickly and easily." In addition to the related stories below, this search will uncover the numerous stories about GeoRSS at Slashgeo.
National Geographics on GeoRSS 2 comments [+]
National Geographics runs a story on GeoRSS named disaster prediction, social networking boosted by geo-data feeds. From the article: "Singh, a staff member at the nonprofit Open Geospatial Consortium, says that the GeoRSS service will extend the capability to create such location-based tags—a concept known as georeferencing—to anyone with an Internet connection. [...] "GeoRSS, by providing an easy and easily agreed-to data format, would enable greater sharing of crucial information on the ground," he said. Now it is up to software companies to incorporate the standard into their products. Already industry giants Microsoft and Yahoo! have taken an interest, Singh says." See our previous related stories below.
GeoRSS Version 1.0 Released 2 comments [+]
The GeoRSS mailing list announced the release of the GeoRSS specifications version 1.0. From the website: "At this point we have completed work on two encodings which we are calling GeoRSS GML and GeoRSS Simple. GeoRSS GML is a formal GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features than Simple, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS84 latitude/longitude. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used just as easily in non-RSS XML encodings. GeoRSS Simple has greater brevity, but also has limited extensibility. It can be used in all the same ways and places as GeoRSS GML."
Application Domains: Various April-May Stories 1 comment [+]
I'm almost up-to-date in terms of geospatial news after my two months leave. Here's some stories not yet featured on slashgeo that I want to make sure our readers don't miss! :-) Let's start with the GeoRSS Buzz PR. Two Slashdot stories about Social Consequences and Effects of RFID Implants and Real RFID Hacking Scenarios. There was also this incredible community effort to map a city in a week-end, Manchester, over OpenStreetMap. Some reading about how to build your own GPS tracking system. Here's a TidBits review of Garmin's StreetPilot 2720. Finally, some tools related to geocoding. One last thing, some have noticed, there's a new poll waiting for your vote :-)
Application Domains: Google using Geo-Targeted RSS Ads [+]
All Points Blog points to a ClickZ article about Google using geo-targeted RSS ads. From the article: "I think there's a lot of potential in geo-targeting RSS feeds, given that the sky's the limit in the number of mobile devices it has the ability to show up on," Marshall said. "Even advertisers that may not understand it at first, I think when you explain it to them, they'd be excited.". See also our previous GeoRSS.org coverage.
Industry: GeoRSS Fun and Not-so-fun 2 comments [+]
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).
GeoRSS In The Works 2 comments [+]
A team is working on Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds. From the overview: "GeoRSS is simple proposal for RSS feeds to also be described by location or Geotagged. We standardize the way in which "where" is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to describe the location of Web content. [...] it should serve as an easy-to-use geotagging language that is brief and simple with useful defaults but extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) GML (Geography Markup Language)".
MGeoRSS: Google Maps API Extension for GeoRSS [+]
Mikel Maron writes "I've reworked some code for parsing GeoRSS in Google Maps into a proper extension: MGeoRSS. This can be quite useful for quickly building maps, like Node.London, and promotes an interoperable geospatial web based on a common data format. With GeoRSS standardization in the works, its important to get the big map players on board to support. * How bout it Google -- are you ready to step up and promote GeoRSS directly in your API? *"
Industry: Geospatial Blogs Entries in Google Earth [+]
This Ogle Earth entry discuss the difficulties of the automated mapping of geospatial blogs news items. Here's the link to the Google Earth placemark. From the blog: "In sum, I think that in the automated post-processing of blog content is not nearly as effective as the pre-processing of content [...] The main unsolved challenge is dealing with multiple relevant locations in one post. It's not something that GeoRSS is really set up to handle, as far as I can see."
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  • too much info?

    (Score:2, Interesting)
    by tf23 (7) on Thursday July 13, @11:02AM (#818)
    Isn't georss the case of possibly putting out too much info about your activities online?

    If I get on the train, and put an entry/photo onto my blog with my cell, then do that when I'm at lunch, then later on the way home. Then an entry again that nite.

    You'd know my route to/from work. And that'd be public information for all to enjoy.

    I know this is just a single example of where information can be abused, but assiging geographical information to everything seems like it'd remove some of the anonymity of the 'net.