[uf-discuss] GEO Microformats

[brian suda]

I have been playing a bit with the GEO microformat[1].

I recently discovered that if you pass a KML file to google maps you
will get all the points in the KML file plotted. Since most people DON'T
have KML files laying around this isn't super interesting. On the other
hand, people do publish hCards, and sometimes those hCards have the GEO
property. (you can even use the GEO microformat independently of hCard).

So i have taken some older XSLT code and used it to generate KML files
from the GEO microformat.

http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-kml.php?uri=http%3A//austin.adactio.com

You can then feed this into google maps and plot the GEO points that it
has found.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-kml.php%3Furi%3Dhttp%253A//austin.adactio.com&t=k&om=1

I am still experimenting with the KML output, but it is a sort of proof
of concept that you can make a google maps mash-up using ANY page that
has a GEO microformat.

Any thoughts, comments, criticisms, ideas are welcome. I'm not a huge
fan of using KML, i know there is a GEORSS and a few other GeoXML
formats, but i'm not sure if there are any tools that consume that XML -
i'm sure someone on this list will let me know, because i can easily
output to other XML formats besides KML

-brian

[1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/geo