Geocoding RSS

From World Wind Wiki

Here is a discusion of 3 off-the-cuff proposals to add gecoding to a feed - from #geo

See bottom for some comments.

[02:39] <@anselm> if you're just doing it correctly in a feed then you have
[02:39] <@anselm> <item>
[02:39] <@anselm>   <title> blah </title>
[02:40] <@anselm>   <link> http://news.com </link>
[02:40] <@anselm>   <description> hi there mom </description>
[02:40] <@anselm>   <geo:longitude> 112.234 </geo:longitude>
[02:40] <@anselm>   <geo:latitude> 45 </geo:latitude>
[02:40] <@anselm> </item>
[02:40] <@anselm> but
[02:40] <adamhill> ok
[02:40] <@anselm> the argument is
[02:40] <@anselm> do it in the description area
[02:40] <@anselm> so instead you do
[02:41] <@anselm> <description> hi there mom geo:lon=112.23 geo:lat=45 </description>
[02:41] <@anselm> and this makes it thru feedster
[02:41] <@anselm> through technorati
[02:41] <@anselm> works with any blog posting mechanism
[02:41] <@anselm> and can be reasonably extracted by a smart aggregator or presentation layer
[02:41] <@anselm> of course there are lots of possibilities such as
[02:41] <adamhill> <sigh>
[02:41] <@anselm> geo:address="1234 may street"
[02:41] <@anselm> but ...
[02:41] <@anselm> i wouldn't wank on it...
[02:42] <@anselm> am i talking about the same thing as you?
[02:42] <adamhill> so if he looked in for all three, he would be covered :)
[02:42] <adamhill> yes
[02:42] <@anselm> oh yes

[

Note that this is just an idea for a way to work with legacy blogging tools that do not support insertion of geolocation in a formal way.

There are lots of other ways - Kevin @ technorati @ #joiito suggests that simply a zipcode would be good enough for some simple applications - being either in the correct metadata or in the description area. Support a variety of methods in your parsers and let the best ways succeed or fail on their own merits.

There is more on the idea here:

http://lists.burri.to/pipermail/geowanking/2005-January/001279.html

And there is related discussion beyond that as well - see the mailing list site itself.

If you are a blogging tool developer then the better suggestion (instead of the above) is to actually add a clickable map interface as the way that people submit a blog post with location. Google maps shows that you can have reasonably rich html based map navigation - it should be not much harder to have reasonably rich map based blog posting. Mikel Maron's project and MapBureau's work may have examples of map based blog posting.

]

[edit] Comments

• I have implemented georss into the hotspots website rss using <geo:lat> <geo:lon> <geo:alt> -- Llynix
• I have updated this to use <geo:long> and removed <geo:alt> as per http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/ --Nosilleg 04:26, 2 Aug 2005 (GMT)