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KML and GeoRSS Support in the Google Maps API Announced

posted by Satri on Thursday March 22, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the supporting-emerging-standards dept.
Google Web Mapping Open Geospatial Consortium
The import cartography blog links to the announcement of Google Maps API's support for GeoRSS feed and KML mapping. Surprisingly, the official blog takes Slashgeo's GeoRSS feed as example (thanks Nigel)! Too bad we haven't completed the work on our GeoRSS Feed (example: non-main page geolocated stories are not yet included in our GeoRSS feed). From the announcement: "To start we now support GeoRSS as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to contribute content to Google Maps. We've built support for the Simple, GML, and W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS -- all you have to do is enter the full URL of a GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file." Obviously, the official GeoRSS blog covers the story. Links to other GeoRSS-related stories below.

Related Stories

GeoRSS Fun and Not-so-fun 2 comments [+]
Waves in the geospatial community regarding GeoRSS (previous story with the GeoRSS Buzz PR). Let's start with this nice Directions Mag article named GeoRSS fun, which discuss GeoRSS brilliantly. Then, there's the debate about the OGC wanting to "hijack" GeoRSS. You must read this Hobu blog entry and Allan Doyle comments. From the Hobu blog: "This post is about my concerns that the Open GIS Consortium's (OGC) seems to be attempting to subvert and subsume GeoRSS. [...] First, I don't think that GeoRSS ever asked to be an OGC standard. Second, the OGC white paper completely disregarded the Creative Commons license [...]" Meanwhile, the Geospatial Semantic Web details how to mix RDF/A with GeoRSS. There's also the related GeoLocateFox extension for Firefox (previous story).
Technology: GeoRSS Version 1.0 Released 2 comments [+]
The GeoRSS mailing list announced the release of the GeoRSS specifications version 1.0. From the website: "At this point we have completed work on two encodings which we are calling GeoRSS GML and GeoRSS Simple. GeoRSS GML is a formal GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features than Simple, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS84 latitude/longitude. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used just as easily in non-RSS XML encodings. GeoRSS Simple has greater brevity, but also has limited extensibility. It can be used in all the same ways and places as GeoRSS GML."
Geo-Enabling the Blogosphere [+]
The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog discuss the scarcity of geo-enabled blogs. Andrew Turner shortly discuss Geospatial Content Management Systems. Meanwhile, there are related stories about geo-enabling Drupal, WordPress. And since I'm not good at keeping secrets, we're working on geo-enabling slash. From the GSWB: "Geotagged blogs will enable web search engines to effectively index blogs based on geographical information. This information will help to build more powerful search engines that support spatial queries (e.g., find all blogs on the topic “war” and written by people who are located in “Iraq”)."
Technology: National Geographics on GeoRSS 2 comments [+]
National Geographics runs a story on GeoRSS named disaster prediction, social networking boosted by geo-data feeds. From the article: "Singh, a staff member at the nonprofit Open Geospatial Consortium, says that the GeoRSS service will extend the capability to create such location-based tags—a concept known as georeferencing—to anyone with an Internet connection. [...] "GeoRSS, by providing an easy and easily agreed-to data format, would enable greater sharing of crucial information on the ground," he said. Now it is up to software companies to incorporate the standard into their products. Already industry giants Microsoft and Yahoo! have taken an interest, Singh says." See our previous related stories below.
GeoRSS Improvements at Yahoo! [+]
The Brain Off blog tells us about improvements of Yahoo! integration of GeoRSS. From the blog: "They have GeoRSS export and polylines in GeoRSS! [...] Yahoo has supported GeoRSS since the beginning of their API, and now giving developers the ability to export their maps into GeoRSS is a great step at encouraging more sharing. However it could go farther."
New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API 2 comments [+]
The Geowanking mailing list tells us Google has opened parts of the Google Maps API for open source development. From the announcement: "Another reason for this open source project is that we've realized that there are many potential extensions for the Google Maps API, but that the common user still needs a reliable and quick-loading API. Adding custom controls/functionality to the core API adds to the file size and forces developers wanting to tweak the code to overwrite obfuscated JS functions. With this open source project, a developer can include the JavaScript file for the particular library they're interested in. They can even download a copy of it and tweak it for their use."
Major New Version of Live Maps Launches [+]
The Virtual Earth blog announced a major new version of Live Maps has just launched, which includes GeoRSS and Firefox extended support. From the announcement: "Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. [...] If you’re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. [...] Live Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well! Collection feeds are GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. [...] This is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that brings maps, travel planning meeting enhancements and a bunch more location based features to Outlook."
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