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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UMBC Ebiquity Group reports how W3C geo vocabulary is currently used in semantic web documents. The analysis is done using the statistics compiled by Swoogle — a Semantic Web search engine and crawler. Swoogle currently knows about 500,000 semantic web documents and 300,000,000 RDF triples.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Geo is currently the 10th highest ranked vocabulary according to Swoogle’s ontology ranking algorithm
• About 240,000 documents reference geo’s namespace
• Top used namespace abbreviation for this ontology is “geo”, “pos” and “wgs84_pos”
• Instances of geo:Point appear far more often in the range value of foaf:base_near property than all other referenced properties combined (close to 100,000 : 1).
• Property geo:long (longitude) and geo:lat (latitude) are often used by instances of geo:Point. Other instances that use these two properties include instances of the Airport class from airport-ont, geo:SpatialThing, dc:image, rdfs:Resource, foaf:Image, and foaf:Person. (see the full list for geo:long and the full list for geo:lat).
• Property geo:alt (altitude) is not used very often in comparison to geo:long and geo:lat.

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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.

The Web has made people smart. It allows the everyday people to discover, publish, and share information. The Web is a profound technology not only because it allows the display of pretty pictures and the layout of well-formatted texts, but also because it’s a technology that everyone can use.

Like the Web technology, geospatial technology should also be developed for the everyday people. The key is to help everyday people, not just few groups of elite techno-geeks, to do more by doing less.

So, what’re those useful geospatial technologies? Many speakers at the Where 2.0 conference have talked about them.

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