[georss] GeoRSS for earthquake/tsunami reporting

[Mikel Maron]

Hi Brian


There's been a bunch of forays for distributing earthquake, tsunami,


and other types of warnings in GeoRSS. Both the USGS and European


Commission have developed similar feeds and these might be good


guides. 

Overall I think that earthquake, tsunami and other disaster

information is very much in need of an open, "simplest thing that works",
RSS derived standard for distribution and aggregation.


For earthquake depth, I see no problem with a negative value in 
<georss:elev>, and would recommend it.


 #2 has more variety, and no clear answer..

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/catalogs/

These USGS feeds were actually some of the first GeoRSS feeds.
They use <dc:subject> to transport the magnitude. 

The newer "ShakeMaps" feed does reference an "eq" namespace, 
but the URI is 404. Elements include "seconds", "depth", "region", 
"shakethumb".


http://tsunami.jrc.it/
http://tsunami.jrc.it/model/Reports/9338/out_9338.xml

The JRC tsunami model puts the "magnitude", "depth", and other elements
directly within the RSS namespace, so it's invalid.

What is very nice about their feeds, however, is that the feed for each
warning contains a series of items, with polygons and timestamps
corresponding to the hour by hour prorogation of the simulated wave.
They use the old informal extension to the W3C "geo" namespace. 
I'd suggest using georss:polygon for the similar purposes in NOAA feeds.


http://www.gdacs.org/
http://www.gdacs.org/XML/RSS.xml

GDACS is a cooperative effort between the UN and the European Commission
to coordinate responses to natural disasters. They use GeoRSS, plus a bunch
of closed, invented namespaces which correspond to different components of the 
system "gdas", "asgard", "glide". 

-Mikel


----- Original Message ----
From: Brian Shiro <brian.shiro at noaa.gov>
To: georss at lists.eogeo.org
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2006 9:42:04 AM
Subject: [georss] GeoRSS for earthquake/tsunami reporting

GeoRSS gurus:

I have created some RSS 2.0 feeds of tsunami bulletins from the  
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.  These include <georss:point> tags  
with the earthquake location, but I'd like to also include earthquake  
depth and magnitude as XML fields.

1) Could I use the <georss:elev> tag with negative elevation values  
to denote depth?

2) Is there any generic tag I could use to denote the earthquake  
magnitude?  Perhaps I could use the <georss:radius> tag, although its  
purpose isn't really clear to me.

I think GeoRSS's ability to define polygons and countries could  
really enhance our tsunami warning products since we could define the  
geographic areas pertinent to a given tsunami bulletin.  If anyone  
has suggestions along these lines, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Thank you,
Brian Shiro
NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center

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