Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS

Lord Satri writes "This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: 'As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities.'"

"Map-making: so easy a caveman could do it"

[GillBates0]

Incidentally, Google also announced in this blog entry [blogspot.com] (titled as above) it's new Google Maps feature which gives users to draw lines, polygons, place placemarkers, and upload location specific pictures/videos via Google Maps.

To me this sounds like a great feature to share travelogues to my family and friends -- makes them much more interesting, when I can plot my route and augment them with my videos/photos/commentary.

That's why we're announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos -- all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We'll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

Some of the examples in that blog entry are pretty interesting, e.g.: America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66 [google.com].

Re:No Mac or Linux?

[xENoLocO]

You mean it plugs into the framework of firefox, and not that it's a XUL "extension", right?

Side note: the entire slashdot post never even mentions XML. RSS is made of XML... so is this... shouldn't this be called GeoXML?

Re:GeoURL

[steevc]

I would think that GeoURL has a different purpose as it has nothing to do with RSS. It's more about being able to see the location of whatever a site relates to. I know that a lot of sites have the GeoURL/ICBM data, but the main site has not developed over the last couple of years. That doesn't stop others from using the data for things like making their own Google maps. Even with my limited Python skills I was able to knock something up based on the members list on our LUG site. A few of us had the GeoURL coordinates on our sites, although some chose to reference a location other than where they live.

I'm still not giving up on the Semantic Web (whatever Web x.0 it may be)