Slashgeo

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."

There a new standard in the work for a Uniform Resource Identifier for geographic locations named geoURI. The published their IETF Internet Draft. They even already released a Firefox extension which supports geoURIs. From their website: "A dedicated Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme for geographic locations would be independent from any protocol, usable by any software/data format that can handle generich URIs. Like a “mailto:” URI launches your favourite mail application today, a “geo:” URI could soon launch your favourite mapping service, or queue that location for a navigation device."

A friend sent me to the Geo microformat for WGS84 geographical coordinates in the works which should be supported natively by Firefox 3. This is related to the geoURI Scheme and the GeoClue project previously discussed. To understand this Geo microformat, read the wikipedia entry on microformats. From the Geo entry's introduction: "Geo is a microformat used for marking up WGS84 geographical coordinates (latitude;longitude) in (X)HTML. Although termed a "draft" specification, this is a formality, and the format is stable and in use; not least as a sub-set of the published hCalendar and hCard microformat specifications. Use of Geo allows parsing tools (for example other websites, or Firefox's Operator extension) to extract the locations, and display them using some other website or mapping tool, or to load them into a GPS device, index or aggregate them, or convert them into an alternative format. Version 3 of the Firefox browser is expected to include native support for microformats[1], including Geo."

Spatial Guru published an entry on an example of GeoCMS using MapServer and Tikiwiki, I realized Slashgeo has not discussed Geospatial Content Management Systems in a while. Searching the geoblogs reminded me of the GeoCMS wikipedia page and of these entries: Dan Karran on how GeoCMSs compare and the Drupal conference, and here's a recent entry on a Midgard example of GeoCMS in use, with OpenStreetMap and Plazes as lego blocks. Here's the OSGeo article on Tikiwiki as a GeoCMS. From this article: "Tikiwiki as a GeoCMS has been implemented in several countries9 and is becoming quite successful since MapServer PHP MapScript is quite stable with Apache. MapServer is an Open Geospatial Con- sortium (OGC) compliant Web Map Server (WMS), which means that many layers can be served over the internet to a wide range of map clients, provid- ing total integration." See also related stories below.