[georss] GeoRSS White Paper

[Allan Doyle]

On Jun 8, 2006, at 16:20, Marc wrote:

> Hi Everybody
>
> I think we have to be careful not to head too much into the gisRSS
> direction. Boxes, polygons and other gis entities are certainly  
> useful,

I'm happy with the set of geometries we have now. I don't see a need  
for more.

> but the huge majority of rss producers and consumers are playing in a
> different field. News-feeds, housing-feeds, dating-feeds, job-feeds  
> and
> so on, all of them would be much more useful if aggregators and
> rss-reader software could filter, aggregate and group feed items
> according to 'geo' entities like country code, state, city, etc.  
> With a
> standard for these encodings geoRSS would make a big step forward, we
> just have to be careful not to make it too complicated for the
> mainstream user. RSS is after all a 'Really Simple Syndication'.

I like the idea of named locations, which is really what an address  
is. I agree that they are more socially useful than geometries.

Trouble is, addresses are hugely complex. I could envision some kind  
of address blob that can get dropped in. Maybe use the featuretypetag  
and relationshiptag

Let someone else deal with the address parsing. There are some good  
geocoders out there. Maybe we can convince the geocoder crowd to make  
nice REST interfaces that take an address and produce a GeoRSS geometry.

There could be some set of Really Useful codes. Country code  
(.de, .ca, etc), Post code (02139, C5G Y0P), Telephone prefix (1,  
44). The trouble with codes is that they can become out of date  
quickly, too. What will the cc for Montenegro be? How long until IETF  
or ISO catch up and add them? What happens when the code for Serbia- 
Montenegro goes away?

Maybe we just need some more blobish tags to stuff some interesting  
things into.

By way of contrast, look at the hoops the microformat people have to  
jump through because XHTML doesn't have anything really suitable.

	Allan

>
> Just my two cents.
>
> Marc
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-- 
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org