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07 April 2007, 04:26
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo support GeoRSS
This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting
Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the
GeoRSS standard. They join Google
which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google
Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial
Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds.
The applications are numerous. With
Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major
players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for
KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not
unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide
KML search capabilities
within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: 'As RSS becomes more and more
prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly
important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that
applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.
To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web
information encoding efforts.
KML and GeoRSS Support
Added to the Google Maps API
One of the things I love most about Google Maps and Google Earth is that it's
easy for anyone to create and display new geographically referenced content.
Whether it's pictures from your vacation, favorite places on the globe, or the
hiking trails you like to visit, all you have
to do is create a KML file (using
Google Earth or any other tool) and load
it up. This idea that you can view data from external sources inside Google Maps
and Earth is really exciting to us, and I'm pleased to announce two major new
features in this area.
To start we now support GeoRSS as a data
format for geographic content in Google Maps. We want to enable users to create
data in whatever format is most convenient for them, and feel that by supporting
both KML and GeoRSS we can enable a wider variety of people and applications to
contribute content to Google Maps. We've built support for the Simple, GML, and
W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS -- all you have to do is enter the full URL of a
GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file.
For example, take a look
at
SlashGeo's GeoRSS on Google Maps.
Most importantly, we've extended support for displaying geographic data -- both
KML and GeoRSS -- into the Google Maps API. Now in addition to programatically
adding content to a Maps API site, you can create your content as KML or GeoRSS
and load it into the Map with a simple function call. This means that the more
than 1 million KML files that are available from all over the web can easily be
mashed up with the map on your site. For example, you can add some vacation
photos from Japan with the following code:
var gx = new GGeoXml("http://kml.lover.googlepages.com/my-vacation-photos.kml");
map.addOverlay(gx);
This makes it easier for API sites to maintain content in a flexible format that
can be accessed via the API or in
a number of other tools directly, and makes it simpler to create a rich API site
with declarative content, instead
of a lot of code.
Below is an example that shows KML and GeoRSS layers rendered on a Google Maps
API powered map. You can toggle on and off the sample layers, or feel free to
enter a URL to your favorite KML or GeoRSS content and hit the 'Add' button to
see it on the map.
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