GeoRSS

GeoRSS
Filename extension	.rss, .xml
Internet media type	application/rss+xml (Registration Being Prepared)
Extended from	XML

GeoRSS is a specification for encoding location as part of a Web feed. (Web feeds are used to describe feeds ("channels") of content, such as news articles, Audio blogs, video blogs and text blog entries. These web feeds are rendered by programs such as aggregators and web browsers.) The name "GeoRSS" is derived from RSS, the most known Web feed and syndication format.

In GeoRSS, location content consists of geographical points, lines, and polygons of interest and related feature descriptions. GeoRSS feeds are designed to be consumed by geographic software such as map generators. By building these encodings on a common information model, the GeoRSS collaboration is promoting interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

At this point, the GeoRSS collaboration has completed work on two primary encodings that are called GeoRSS-Simple and GeoRSS GML. GeoRSS-Simple is meant as a very lightweight format that developers and users can easily add to their existing RSS and Atom feeds with little effort. GeoRSS-Simple supports basic geometries (point, line, box, polygon) and covers the typical use cases when encoding locations. GeoRSS GML is a formal Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features than GeoRSS Simple, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS84 latitude/longitude. There is also a W3C GeoRSS serialization, which is older and partly deprecated but still the most widely used.

GeoRSS can be used to extend both RSS 1.0 and 2.0, as well as Atom, the IETF's latest standard for feeds.

Examples

Here's a GeoRSS Simple example using Atom.

 
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" 
       xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">
   
   International earthquake observation labs
    href="http://example.org/"/>
   2005-12-13T18:30:02Z
   
      Dr. Thaddeus Remor
      tremor@quakelab.edu
   
   urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6
   
      
       href="http://example.org/2005/09/09/atom01"/>
      urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a
      2005-08-17T07:02:32Z
      
We just had a big one.
      45.256 -71.92
   
 

Here is a schema fragment for a GeoRSS GML encoding for RSS 2.0

  
   version="2.0" 
       xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" 
       xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml">
    
    http://maps.google.com
    
    One guy's view of Cambridge, Massachusetts
    
       isPermaLink="true">00000111c36421c1321d3
      Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:16:31 +0000
      
      The heart and soul of the "new" Cambridge. Depending on where you 
               stand, you can feel like you're in the 1970s or 2020.
      rajrsingh
      
        
          
            
              
                +71.106216 42.366661
                +71.105576 42.367104
                +71.104378 42.367134
                +71.103729 42.366249
                +71.098793 42.363331
                +71.101028 42.362541
                +71.106865 42.366123
                +71.106216 42.366661
              
            
          
        
      
    
   
 

Here is example of W3C geo GeoRSS

 
 
                  media="screen"?>
  version="2.0" 
      xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" 
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  
     
     Real-time, worldwide earthquake list for the past 7 days
     https://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/
     U.S. Geological Survey
     Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:56:15 PST
     
       Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:24:17 GMT
       
       December 28, 2007 05:24:17 GMT
       https://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007llai.php
       5.5319
       95.8972
     
   
 

See also

• Geospatial Content Management System
• Atom (standard), the IETF's XML-based Web syndication format.
• RSS - Really Simple Syndication.

External links

• Georss.org (archived 2020-09-09), web site for GeoRSS specifications (describes all 3 encodings) and examples
• OGC Whitepaper (pdf), Open Geospatial Consortium: An Introduction to GeoRSS.