As Mikel Maron starts out pointing out in his GeoRSS talk, GeoRSS has been mentioned in all five of the morning’s talks.
Mikel restates Ray Ozzies’s quote that “RSS is the Unix pipe of the Internet”, and his presentation shows that GeoRSS follows up well on that promise. GeoRSS provides “a number of ways to encoding location in RSS feeds”, and is an easy and standardized way to share and aggregate geographically tagged feeds like Yahoo!’ Traffic.
Mikel’s own stated uses are:
- Linking systems. (One more less thing to find agreement on)
- Monitoring geographic wikis (like OpenStreetMap or Tagzania)
- Syndicating sensor data
- Tearing down the walls (through standardization)
GeoRSS has been put to use in many places over the past year since it was first released, including the European Union’s geographic warning systems (GEDACS) which is a twisted multi-national coordination of agencies. Web application support is spreading like wildfire showing up at places like Yahoo! (Maps API, Upcoming, Traffic and Weather), Microsoft, Ning, and Tagzania, with the obvious exception being Google Maps. Non-GeoRSS compliant sites can, however, be handled through adaptors like Mapstraction which creates high-level libraries for interface to all major providers, including Google, Y!, Microsoft, and Where2.0 crowd favourite OpenStreetMap.
A bunch of GeoRSS aggregators have popped up, including Mikel’s own mapufacture. For example, have a look at the Where 2.0 GeoRSS aggregation, including feeds from Platial, Flickr and Tagzania.