Showing posts with label Open Geospatial Consortium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Geospatial Consortium. Show all posts

06 April 2007

Where in the World is GeoRSS?

A Slashdot post reveals the precise geographical location of my ignorance about GeoRSS:

Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. 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. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

This is apparently a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium, although, alas, its openness is limited in extent:

Q: Does OGC promote free software and free data?

A: No. OGC promotes the development and use of consensus-derived publicly available and open specifications that enable different geospatial systems (commercial or public domain or open source) to interoperate. For example, OpenGIS Specifications can be used to geospatially enable interoperable Web based applications and portals. These applications or portals can provide either free or available-for-fee services and data that are widely available to Web users.