Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Microsoft Live Maps announced the support for GeoRSS. An announcement was sent to the GeoRSS mailing list by Steve Lombardi of Microsoft.

Many thanks to those on this list that have assisted with this feature! We launched a new version of Live Maps today with GeoRSS publishing as a top feature. When viewing another users public Collection, there is a ‘classic’ RSS button (I saw the proposed GeoRSS Icon a little too late for this release! We’ll update next time) to pluck a GeoRSS feed for the collection. Points, lines and Polys are supported. As an example, here is my collection of bike trails around Seattle:

http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=546E7E30AC2C5011!1749

And here is its GeoRSS feed.

Live Maps also received several functional updates:

• Firefox support for 3D mapping
• Enhanced ratings and reviews of business listings
• Subscribe to a Collection via RSS
• Area calculations and drawing enhancements

Live Maps’s support for GeoRSS comes only few days after a similar announcement from Google Maps. This is interesting. Microsoft was not typically known for its enthusiasm in supporting community standards — think JavaScript in IE 6. Since there is no immediate financial profits for Live Maps to support GeoRSS, I wonder what caused Microsoft to suddenly support this community standard?

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Google Maps now supports data files that are described in GeoRSS. GeoRSS is a set of vocabularies for encoding location objects in RSS feeds. The Goolge Maps API Official Blog has few demos that highlight this new feature.

This is a great news to the GeoRSS community. For awhile, people criticize GeoRSS for being too complex and lacking strong industry backing. Many others think KML, Google’s own location markup language, will eventually overtake GeoRSS because of the popular usage of Google Maps and Google Earth.

The situation is now completely different. With Google Maps embracing GeoRSS, we should see greater demand and usage of GeoRSS on the Web. Could this be the beginning of a new geospatial (semantic) web trend?

I hope so. GeoRSS and its alike should encourage more people to express location information on the Web with explicit description. This may eventually lead to the habit of publishing other types of semantic information on the Web (e.g., SKOS, FOAF and Dublin Core).

Other interesting GeoRSS + Google Maps demos:

• Pleiades — study of ancient geography
• Charles Chuang’s MyMap — maps of different locations in Taiwan.
• Irish Blogs on a Map – RSS -> GeonamesRSS -> Google Maps

Brian Suda prototyped an XSLT transformation service for transforming documents with Microformat Geo markups to GeoRSS and Google KML representation. The XSLT files used by the service are available for download.

Microformat Geo is a simple format for marking up geographical latitude and longitude information within XHTML, XML and RSS. Its representation originates from the vCard standard (RFC2426).

I think this service is interesting for the following reasons:

1. As Microformat gaining traction in the Web community, we need this kind of services to bridge the representation between Microformat geo and others (e.g. GeoRSS, KML and W3C Geo).
2. It demonstrates the feasibility to use existing technology such as XSLT to enable information sharing and integration on the Web. Mapping and integration at the syntax level should be the first step, and mapping between ontologies and semantics should be the second step.
3. It’s a strong evidence that shows the realization of the Semantic Web doesn’t dependent on a single ontology. Multiple ontologies, even competing ones, can live in harmony and used by different applications simultaneously. I can imagine using services like this will enable Google Earth to display data expressed in GeoRSS, which is embraced by Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Maps to display data expressed in KML, which is the proprietary format of Google Earth.

Spotted in a message posted by Danny Ayers to the mailing list of W3C Geospatial Incubator Group.

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. annouced the release of the “OGC GeoRSS White Paper“.

GeoRSS is a simple proposal for geo-enabling, or tagging, “really simple syndication” (RSS) feeds with location information. GeoRSS standardizes the way in which “where” is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to describe the location of Web content. It is extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC GML (Geography Markup Language®).

GeoRSS is an important stepping stone in the evolution of the geo-semantic web. It is the product of an informal collaboration of geospatial professionals applying expertise in Web standards, syndication, and the Semantic Web. An incubator group within W3C is working to progress things further (see www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/charter). This incubator activity represents an important link between the OGC and W3C communities to address the growing importance of the Semantic Web and the need for locally relevant information accessible through a variety of networked devices.

Spotted on Directions Magazine.

Not too long ago I wrote about a Semantic Web idea of using GeoRSS and Geonames to enhance Kiva.ORG’s user interface. Mikel Maron wrote me today, and told me that he has put up a map of Kiva loan applications using the technologies that I’ve described.

The map application takes an RSS feed of Kiva’s loan applications and augments the content with geographical coordinates information using the Geonames’s RSS to GeoRSS Converter service. The resulting geocoded RSS feed is then fed to Mapufacture.

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RDF/A is a syntax for layering RDF information on any XML document, via attributes. GeoRSS is a syntax for annotating geographical information in RSS feeds. In the past, I’ve showed examples using RDF/A.

Today I saw James Fee blogging about GeoRSS. I thought it will be interesting to try to mix GeoRSS and RDF/A.

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