location-formats

Location Formats

This is a list of previous efforts at location / geographic ("Geo") data formats and protocols, as background research for developing a location format.

vCard & hCard

vCard (RFC2426) and hcard includes 'adr', a way to markup addresses. There is also a field called 'geo' for lat/long.

ICBM

Comma seperated list of lat/long <meta name="ICBM" content="XXX.XXXXX, XXX.XXXXX"> [1]

This is incorrect. It is one pair, not a list.

GeoUrl

• GeoURL

Flickr Geotags

• Flickr GeoTagging A Greasemonkey script for adding lat and long tags to flick pictures. He uses Google Maps to get the lat and long. Users have to enter search terms (address, etc) and then select a point on the google map. Photos are tagged with "geo:lat=xx.xxxx", "geo:lon=xx.xxxx" and "geotagged" and aggregated at [2]
• A Flickr Group related to the topic
• A visual walkthrough of the technique.
• As of today (2005-06-01), 14k photos have been geotagged on Flickr.
• mappr, mapping flickr also support these geotags.
• flickr also supports EXIF headers, which can be used for storing location.

Geotagging

• Geotagging has been employed in other hosted services: delicious, Typepad, Yahoo 360

A2B

A2B is a location based search engine. Lat and long only. Seems to pick stuff up from geo meta tags. Pages can either be manually entered or pinged. They support lat/long and ICBM meta tags.

RSS

Several people have tried putting geographic information into RSS.

• This site uses icbm coordinates and has plugins for several blogging packages.
• BlogMapper - appears to be adding a namespace to RSS.
• BlogMap - picks up RSS extension and meta tag values
• worldKit RSS docs - worldKit advocates and understands various flavors of geocoded RSS; particularly the "geo" namespace.
• USGS earthquake feed - most widely used geocoded RSS feed
• Polygons and lines in polygons - A simple format for expressing polygons and lines is defined for worldKit

Address2Coordinates

Both of these systems are freely available sources of address to lat/long mappings (US only). I think they're based on US Census data, so they might be up to date.

• TIGER
• FIPS
• geocoder
• You can get coordinates from UK post-codes from streetmap
• Worldwide city level location data (over 4 million entries) is available from the GNS. This is accessible as a REST service from the worldkit geocoder

Plazes

Plazes is a system that does geo-info based on the network access point that the user's computer is connected to. They use tagging to identify locations.

Mapping Sites

• Multimap
• Google Maps
• MapQuest
• Yahoo Maps
• MapBlast
• mapufacture

Semantic Web

• Geosemantics Interest Group
• GeoOnion - a SW vocuabulary for relating items by distance from each other.
• RDFMap
• GeoRDF similar effort to collect prior art, for an effort in interoperability between OGC standards and various lightweight geo formats.

GML

Geographic Markup Language - a "600 page standard"

Google

Google Earth XML

20050629 at Where 2.0 conference:

"Google Earth has an XML schema for describing a place on the earth. Will be releasing today or tomorrow." 
  - John Hanke of Google/Keyhole.

Reverse engineered here today...

Google Maps API

• Google Maps API documentation
• KML = keyhole markup language KML Reverse Engineered Schema (for Google Earth, not Maps)

Yahoo Maps API

• Yahoo Maps API documentation

OGC

Open Geospatial Consortium

WCS

Web Coverage Service

What People are Publishing

• links to mapping services, canonical URLs to 3rd party services like:
  • Google Maps
  • Map Quest
  • Yahoo Maps

• named places, e.g. Westin St. Francis
• addresses
• Lat & Lon
  • MAKE has a GeoURL button
  • Geo in RSS. Means a particular blog post is associated with a specific lat/long. Not specific about whether it means the location that the post was made from or the location was the post was about.

Other Formats

(move these into lists near top of document)

• GPX = GPS XML format