[georss] Georss extension

[Carl Reed OGC Account]

Marc -

Good points all. And I agree with your thinking regarding perhaps a simple 
xAL.

I think that what I am suggesting is that there are perhaps schema  snippets 
of xAL that would be very useful. By using common taggage, interoperabity 
would be enhanced (my belief anyway). I would not suggest using the entire 
xAL schema. I agree that this would be way to heavy for georss. That said, 
we went through a similar dialogue with regard to GML and GeoRSS. GML is 
extremely expressive - a pretty generic - just the way xAL is. So, we had to 
think about how to structure a really light weight info model that would 
allow for a very simple serialization for GML GeoRSS. So I am totally 
agreeing with your thought regarding a simple xAL - one that covers 
zones/regions and we document this serialization.

As to Country codes, I would recommend international best practice - ISO. 
All the internet standards use ISO. I believe that all the W3C standards 
that need to specify country code use the ISO standard. And I know that all 
the OASIS standards that I have been involved with use the ISO standard. 
Related to this are the ISO language codes (2 letter and 3 letter). The 
international language folks decided to make answering the question "Should 
I use two-letter or three-letter ISO language codes in language tags?" easy. 
There is now an IANA registry. 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry .

Sorry, beginning to wander . . .

Have a good weekend.

Carl



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc" <marc at geonames.org>
To: "Carl Reed OGC Account" <creed at opengeospatial.org>
Cc: "Pat Cappelaere" <pat at cappelaere.com>; <georss at lists.eogeo.org>; "Dan 
Mandl" <dan.mandl at gsfc.nasa.gov>; "Stuart Frye" <Stuart.Frye at gsfc.nasa.gov>; 
"Linda Derezinski" <linda at innovatesolutions.com>; 
<ows-4-swe at opengeospatial.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 1:09 AM
Subject: Re: [georss] Georss extension


> Hi Carl
>
> xAL is a fantastic specification, no doubt about it. I just have the 
> feeling it is too complicated for 'Really Simple Syndication' and it is 
> addressing an other problem. I am not speaking about addresses since 
> lat/lng are already covering this granularity. What I have in mind is the 
> higher level granularity where lat/lng does not make sense.
>
> I would like to illustrate the complexity of xAL with one single line of 
> the example you provided.
>
>> <CountryNameCode>US</CountryNameCode>
>
> You could also have written :
> <CountryNameCode>USA</CountryNameCode>
>
> The xAL specification does not say which country code is contained in the 
> element (at least I am not able to find it, please correct me if I am 
> wrong). What about this :
> <CountryNameCode>AU</CountryNameCode>
>
> Does AU refer to Australia or Austria?
>
> There is absolutely no way for you to know, as both are perfectly legal 
> and widely used country codes. In ISO 'AU' stands for Australia and in 
> FIPS 'AU' stands for Austria. To make unequivocally sure which country you 
> mean you have to write :
>
> <CountryNameCode Scheme=iso.3166-2>AU</CountryNameCode>
>
> The point I am trying to make is : 'How does Joe Average Programmer know 
> this?' Don't we need a simple and bulletproof specification understandable 
> also for non gis-specialists?
> Maybe we can agree on a subset of xAL, a kind of "Simple xAL". The xAL 
> specification clearly says : "Important: Use only elements and attributes 
> that make sense to you. Ignore the rest that are needless for you. "
>
> Cheers
>
> Marc