[Geowanking]RSS standardization and Geo

[Anselm Hook]

I've been playing with writing a kind of 'stuff trader' service built on
top of an rss aggregator...  some of the previous comments on this list
now make more sense to me...

For example it seems like geography is just one aspect of extended
metadata that people will want to spice up their feeds with...  RSS 2.0 or
an RDF based notation should (and do) allow arbitrary metadata.

One can imagine a time when people can post their schedules, their
wishlists, anything they can imagine, and have those descriptions act like
agents - where something proactively evaluates all lists; looks for
matching schedules, or geographic proximity, or mutually intersecting
wishes - and wires those people together...  It would be like a futuristic
collaborative version of the personal information managers that
individuals have today...

On a similar note - regarding where to get standards from - I'm beginning
to see that geourl and other 'social mapping services' are not actually
very much related to standards promoted by OpenGIS such as GML.  However
OpenGIS colored glasses are often used to evaluate these services.  This
is like using hubble to bird-watch...  or trying to scale down a tank to
make a bicycle...  or requiring the use of C instead of Perl for all
problems... there are distinct domains here and the distinct approaches
seem to represent those underlying realities rather than just hacker
sloth.  Even the minimal GML profile is a bemoth.  Also the OpenGIS
thinking has a broadcast centric model not a peer to peer model;
individual websites are not 'enriched' with geotags in an OpenGIS mode.

One concern about the conflation of social mapping with GIS is that
projects such as Digital Earth appear to be more 'worthy and
comprehensive' than projects such as geourl...  (IMO if Josh had attempted
to do geourl with OpenGIS compliant standards it would never have gotten
any attention since there would have been no enrichment to the individuals
personal website).

 - a

Jo wrote:

> i'll offer a reading of the situation. as i understand it, an RSS(2.0)
> module is providing an XML namespace with a vocabulary for talking
> about [threads | books | people | geolocation | whatever].

Mikel wrote:

> It seems any standard would be driven by application, whether software
> or hardware (ubiquitous gps) -- such as where ICBM meta tag has become
> defacto standard for indicating -something- geo about HTML, due to
> geourl