About the ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer

Synopsis

This is a map app that displays GeoRSS files. It implements two different varieties of GeoRSS, plus all of Yahoo!'s enhancements to GeoRSS including address geocoding, plus a couple of things from basic RSS that Yahoo! missed. Feel free to use it with your own GeoRSS and Yahoo! Simple Map files.

Background

GeoRSS is a simple XML-based file format used for adding location information to data items. It is based on RSS 2.0, plus a couple additional elements - <geo:lat> and <geo:long> - that let you specify the geographical location of each <item> element.

There's also another variety of GeoRSS called Simple GeoRSS, which uses a different syntax - <georss:point> - for the location info.

Yahoo! took GeoRSS and added a bunch more elements of their own. The most significant difference is that the latitude and longitude elements are optional in Yahoo!'s version. If you prefer, you can specify the location by street address. Yahoo! then does geocoding behind the scenes to turn the addresses into latitude and longitude.

Try It

Examples

Here are some sample maps:

California State Parks

Alan Brown put together a great map of all the California State Parks. It uses groups for different types of parks, so it's very colorful.

California Prisons

Ducky Sherwood's map of California prison facilities.

BART and Caltrain stations Together

Jeffrey McManus made a map of BART stations, and Trifon made one of Caltrain stations. You can view them separately, or mashed together on one map.

Yahoo! Traffic Alerts near

Yahoo! has an API for fetching traffic alerts. It is available in GeoRSS form, so it just drops right in here. This form interface lets you show up to three different locations on the same map.

Golden Gate Sunsets

I made my own GeoRSS map showing the spots from which you can watch the setting sun right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge.

UC Berkeley Plaques

Here's one of the various informational plaques around the University of California Berkeley campus.

Miscellany

Joe Crawford's San Diego Bloggers, Jamie Glenn's San Francisco Dog Parks, Asher Blum's Sunnyvale Street Maintenance, potrerohillsf.com's Potrero Hill Robberies, my own Dirty Harry Movie Locations.

If you have an example you'd like to show off in the list above, just let me know.

Usage

To use the map page, you first make a GeoRSS XML file and put it on a web server somewhere. Then you take the URL for the map page and the URL for your XML file and stick them together, like so:
http://acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=http://example.com/yourxmlfile.xml

You can display more than one XML file in the same map if you like:
http://acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=http://example.com/xmlfile1.xml&xmlsrc=//example.com/xmlfile2.xml

GeoRSS

Here's an annotated sample GeoRSS file showing all the different elements implemented by this map page, in context. Most of them are optional. For more details, follow the links in the key:

ACME Laboratories / GeoRSS / About