Who says Google doesn’t care about standards? When playing around with the RSS feed from Picasa Web Albums, I was pleasantly surprised to see full-blown GeoRSS GML for the geo-located items. In fact, they are recording both an Envelope and a Point for the photo. I don’t know where the Envelope comes from, because the UI only allows you to specify a point, but oh well.

<georss:where>
   <gml:Envelope>
      <gml:lowerCorner>42.4857087 -71.2902409</gml:lowerCorner>
      <gml:upperCorner>42.4984298 -71.265822</gml:upperCorner>
   </gml:Envelope>
   <gml:Point>
      <gml:pos>42.4920693 -71.2780315</gml:pos>
   </gml:Point>
</georss:where>

Now I’d just like to know why they are using RSS 2.0 with little bits of Atom sprinkled here and there…

At FOSS4G 2009 I finally went to a code sprint, partly as a form of meditation, and partly to see if I had any developer chops left. Well the jury is still out on that, but it was relaxing, and what came out of it was the first release of SimpleWFS.

SimpleWFS is a 100% Java servlet that serves any data in PostGIS via the WFS Simple API. Output formats supported are BXFS and KML, among others (GML and Atom coming soon). My hope is that SimpleWFS can be up and running in under a half hour, exponentially increasing the ease of getting more spatial data on the web.

Please try it out and help improve it.

Google announced a data API for Maps this morning in San Jose. This is basically a CRUD service for storing geodata in “the cloud” that leverages Atom in lots of ways. That didn’t sound very world-shaking to me at first since there aren’t even any basic spatial query functions, but there are some ways in which this could be a game-changing service — if you trust Google to be your data custodian.

1. you’re freed from figuring out how to store your data
2. web and phone data creation APIs come free
3. base maps come free too

I’ve felt something like this has been needed for a long time. In my past life doing GIS for urban planning a lot of great initiatives got bogged down by the complexities of how and where to store data and who would administer it after the MIT “techies” left. Hopefully this kind of service gets us over that hurdle.

It will be very interesting to see the uptake of this.

After the untimely demise last year of my sandbox server at MIT, I haven’t been good at advertising (or even doing) technology experiments. I’m finally getting my act together now, and have a few interesting things out on the Interwebs:

Coordinate projection service is a useful little thing that also is a nice sample of GeoRSS-GML

US Cities lets you query a database of US cities by name or bounding box, and returns the results in either GeoAtom (Atom + GeoRSS) or BXFS. It’s also OpenSearch enabled, so you can add it as a search engine type in Firefox.

I agree with Tim Bray (via Eric Garrido (via Bill de hÓra)). USB is an awesome standard because it “just works.” Ever debugged a USB stick?

A big step towards making RSS as clean and efficient is to drop the old, crusty RSS flavors and just use Atom. That’s what OGC has been doing more and more, and that’s why this site advertises only an Atom feed, even though it uses Wordpress and could easily advertise more.