By Randall S. Newton
Editor-in-Chief
The open source geospatial community is working on a way to embed location data into RSS, the “news feed” technology now in common use on the Web. The goal is to make it simple for any RSS news feed to send geo-coded information that could automatically generate a map.
RSS is a family of XML formats for exchanging news, especially news about Web pages or other Web content. Many dynamic web sites, including AECnews, provide RSS “feeds” of their new or changed content. Readers can subscribe using a news reader or RSS-enabled email software.
A standard for creating and using geo-coded data in RSS is evolving, called GeoRSS. The idea is to add location identity to the news feed. A consumer-level application of GeoRSS would be a blog writer who is riding a bicycle across America. Each blog entry could include a location description. As the trip continues and the blogger keeps writing, the individual points described add up to a linear path that could be defined on a map.
A scenario more relevant to AEC/GIS would be searching an RSS-enabled municipal database in order to generate a map of homes not hooked to the local sewer system. Real-time data can be geo-coded, such as traffic accidents on the freeway. Commuters could use a cell phone RSS reader to get live traffic reports highlighting trouble spots. Proprietary applications already exist for these two examples, but the difference GeoRSS offers is the ability to make “where-ness” part of the essential underlying structure of the World Wide Web.
Data aggregation and geographic search will be enriched by GeoRSS. Want to know what public buildings in your area code fail to meet local earthquake standards? A web-based query to a geo-encoded database could extract the data and draw a map showing the location of every building.
Standards committees have completed an initial round of work on two versions of GeoRSS technology. The first, GeoRSS GML, is a formal application profile following the Geographic Markup Language profile. It is meant for professional settings and large datasets requiring a robust implementation. The second, GeoRSS Simple, is a subset of GeoRSS GML meant more for consumer-grade applications.
A number of organizations have already implemented GeoRSS in open source and commercial mapping, blogging and other software products. Yahoo and Microsoft have expressed interest. Raj Singh, Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Interoperability Programs and a member of the original team that created GeoRSS explains, “We designed GeoRSS to be easily implemented in software. Once GeoRSS is part of an application, it allows just about anyone to point a GeoRSS-enabled feed at GeoRSS enabled software and instantly make a map.”
OGC staff and members, RSS experts, map hackers, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and geospatial professionals all joined in the collaboration on GeoRSS, hoping to unify the various methods to add location data to pictures, blogs, web pages and e-mail messages. The result was a simple XML format for associating a point, line, boundary or bounding box with an RSS item. Several members are considering submitting GeoRSS into the OGC standards process for discussion.
Mikel Maron, who was among those involved in developing GeoRSS and is the developer of mapufacture and worldKit, sees significant possibilities for the encoding. “RSS makes unanticipated connections possible, giving rise to a flexible and fluid service architecture for the Web. GeoRSS leverages this teeming ecosystem for geospatial technology, and with OGC support, GeoRSS is on firm conceptual ground and gains exposure across the industry.”
A background report from the Open Geospatial Consortium contributed to this report.
Technorati Tags: GeoRSS geospatial GIS XML Mikel Maron Raj Singh