Geonames Users - References

Draft for Encoding Geographic Features in RSS

Motivation

A great number of feed items are bound to a geographical location. Real estate, dating, events, news and many other feeds have a locale meaning and are more interesting for feed readers in a relatively small geographic area.

It is thus important to include geographic information in RSS. Feed aggregators and reader software tools can use this geographic information to filter, group prioritize or simply display the item on a satellite image or map.

This draft show how the most relevant geographic information can be included in RSS.

Example

<geonames:where>
   <geonames:geonameId>63256</geonames:geonameId>
   <geonames:lat>45.256</geonames:lat>
   <geonames:long>-71.92</geonames:long>
   <geonames:countryCode>AU</geonames:countryCode>
   <geonames:regionCode>NSW</geonames:regionCode>
   <geonames:city>Wollongong</geonames:city>
   <geonames:postalCode>2500</geonames:postalCode>
   <geonames:address>1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW</geonames:address>
</geonames:where>

countryCode : two-letter ISO 3166 country code
regionCode : national first level subdivisions (state, canton, region, province, prefecture) as in ISO 3166-2
city : city, township, shi (JP)
postalCode : postal code, zip
address : address as text

Open Issues

do we need feature types (lake, mountain, populated place,...).

Other related encodings

GeoRSS : http://www.georss.org
Cons : Does only encode lat/lng, encodings for countrycode, admin division, postalcode, placename and address are missing.
IETF : http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-geopriv-dhcp-civil-09.txt
Cons : Too complex for our needs (we don't need room numbers ...); naming the elements A1 - A6 is quite confusing
opengeospatial : http://schemas.opengeospatial.net/ows/1.0.0/ows19115subset.xsd
Cons : it is not clear whether they use codes for country and region.
oasis-open : http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/download.html
Cons : a 90 pages specification : as they write in the specification "Important: Use only elements and attributes that make sense to you. Ignore the rest that are needless for you."
microformat : http://microformats.org/wiki/adr
Yahoo! Maps : http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/simple/V1/reference.html
Cons : US specific, not usable internationally (example : postal codes are strings in the UK and not integer)

Document History

2006 December 11 : added geonameId

2006 August 27 : first version based on a draft for GeoRSS, Marc Wick (geonames.org)