I’m really pleased to see the Ordnance survey presenting at this years 
Where 2.0 Conference this May in San Jose, California. Its important because it demonstrates that both “old” geography and neogeograhpy can learn from each other. This was a point well made by Jack Dangermond at last years event, and hopefully Ian and Mikel’s presentation will demonstrate the real benefit of this mash-up of approaches
Another one of those things I have been meaning to do for ages, was to implement GeoRSS in the feed for edparsons.com. This has been more frustrating that I would have liked, but it now works.
Why the frustration, firstly there are three favours of GeoRSS, Simple and GML which you will find documented at the GeoRSS website and the so-called W3C Geo standard which for historic reasons is also widely used.
So I started initially using the GML encoding only to find there are very few readers which work with it, so OK back to the simple version and a little greater success.
So I guess we are still at the walking rather than running stage for GeoRSS, buts its great to see the major traditional GIS vendors as well as GYM beginning to adopt this approach.
This has value way beyond blogging and putting pins on web maps however, I think there is great potential for GML encoded GeoRSS to offer a realistic alternative to the Web Feature Server as a mechanism for supplying changed feature data in a change only update service.
We often talk in terms of users subscribing to a service for updated data, well GeoRSS seems to be designed for just this purpose.
To learn more watch the GeoRSS blog and all credit to Mikel for his GeoRSS google map plug-in which was used to produce the map above.
As I blogged a year ago I have been a supporter of the moves to simplify Geographic Markup Language (GML). There are good technical reasons, in particular making feature streaming practical, that require a simpler vocabulary than the full GML 3 specification.
But we must also realise that there is a major perception issue that GML is too verbose and just plain difficult. This is of course an over simplification of the facts and may have been driven by some vendors comments in the past, but perception has becomes reality.
In this context it is good to see the OGC in the form of Sam Bacharachs’ article in directionsmag evangelising on the potential of the simple features spec of GML.
I would argue that this is just what we need the OGC to be doing, it needs to get out and really explain why the use of open standards is important, and not be seen to be merely as a club for standards enthusiasts. After-all for a standard like simple GML there is always the alternative of KML !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.