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).

AnyGeo reports about BRIGHTi GeoFeeder from Bright Solutions. Here is the feature list reported by AnyGeo.

"Features:
1. Convert to all variations of GeoRSS formats including RSS, ATOM and Simple, GML, and W3C encodings.
2. Works with the following formats/extensions: .kml, .kmz, .gml, .shp, .mif, .dxf
3. Convert vector data (points, lines and polygons) to GeoRSS
4. Map feature attributes to GeoRSS attributes
5. Specify multiple attributes for or elements
6. Displays all features on a Virtual Earth map
7. Browse features and attributes
8. Zoom and pan"

The Virtual Earth blog announced a major new version of Live Maps has just launched, which includes GeoRSS and Firefox extended support. From the announcement: "Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. [...] If you’re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. [...] Live Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well! Collection feeds are GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. [...] This is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that brings maps, travel planning meeting enhancements and a bunch more location based features to Outlook."

The import cartography blog links to the announcement of Google Maps API's support for GeoRSS feed and KML mapping. Surprisingly, the official blog takes Slashgeo's GeoRSS feed as example (thanks Nigel)! Too bad we haven't completed the work on our GeoRSS Feed (example: non-main page geolocated stories are not yet included in our GeoRSS feed). From the announcement: "To start we now support GeoRSS as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to contribute content to Google Maps. We've built support for the Simple, GML, and W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS -- all you have to do is enter the full URL of a GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file." Obviously, the official GeoRSS blog covers the story. Links to other GeoRSS-related stories below.

Christian Spanring links to a FOSS4G2006 open document presentation named It's About Time for Time. From the abstract: ""The weakness of current cartography is its poor representation of time. The surface of the earth is treated as a static thing." (Anselm Hook) [...] There are numerous experiments, but little solid support in tools or data structures for representing the 4th dimension (when we're still getting used to the 3rd dimension in GIS)." The time capabilities of GeoRSS and Google Earth are mentioned. Previous poll on time.

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.

The Brain Off blog tells us about improvements of Yahoo! integration of GeoRSS. From the blog: "They have GeoRSS export and polylines in GeoRSS! [...] Yahoo has supported GeoRSS since the beginning of their API, and now giving developers the ability to export their maps into GeoRSS is a great step at encouraging more sharing. However it could go farther."

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.

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.

The High Earth Orbit blog links to the GeoClue project which aims at providing a geographic information service for applications. This project in development will be presented at the GNOME conference in Birmingham, UK. From the website: "GeoClue is a project that provide all kinds of geography information to an application. This is through a very abstract DBus interface in which a variety of backends can be used to provide this implementation. Although we implement a few reference backends, creating your own is encouraged. There are many separate APIs that are planned including * Position * Map * Routing * Geocode * Track Logs" From the presentation's synopsis: "Emerging open-standards such as GeoRSS, KML, geo-uri, and Geo W3C all enable easy publishing and sharing of geographic information from many data sources. GeoClue aims to provide users with a application that can determine their position from a variety of location providers and find information that is local to them."