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The Geo Microformat for the Web
posted by Satri
on Wednesday September 26, @02:49PM
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from the microgeo-and-minigeo-goes-to-meet-the-web dept.
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from the microgeo-and-minigeo-goes-to-meet-the-web dept.
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."
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GeoLocateFox Firefox Extension
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Spatially Adjusted tells us about the new FireFox extension that support GeoLocation. From the website: "It adds a new icon to the lower right hand side of your browser. A little grey globe. The globe illuminates if the website your visiting supports GeoLocation. You can then put your mouse over the icon to view where the website is located. You can click on the icon to get a larger view of the Map."
geoURI Scheme: a URI for Geographic Locations
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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."
The GeoClue Project: Geographic Information Service for Apps
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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."
WikiMiniAtlas for MediaWiki
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galetrouge writes "I just found out about this MediaWiki Javascript plugin. Based on the MediaWiki page it seems to date back to August of this year. "WikiMiniAtlas is Javascript plugin to display a draggable, zoomable, and clickable worldmap in geocoded Wikipedia articles. The map contains links to all other geocoded articles in Wikipedia and can be magnified down to approximate 100m resolution worldwide. While it looks similar to GoogleMaps it is our own software and free data.". It is embedded inside the coord template, which is mainly used to geotag the wikipedia pages : "Clicking the blue globe activates the WikiMiniAtlas". On the contrary of the google map extension it is not permanent on the page but pops up upon request. Also it looks like they will embed OpenStreetMap.org data soon." I copied below previous stories on geo-plugins for mediawiki, wikipedia and such.
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