Using GeoRSS to Syndicate the Spatiotemporal Information

This paper describes a number of ways to encode spatiotemporal information in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location and time is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map spatiotemporally tagged feeds. This paper describes the GeoRSS model and encodings. With every RSS item has a timestamp, GeoRSS can represent time property for free. There are three GeoRSS encoding standards, such as W3C Geo, GeoRSS Simple, and GeoRSS GML profile. These standards differ in the number of coordinate systems they can support, and in the number of different geometric shapes they can add to the map to show where the news or event of interest is taking place. Further more, this paper described how to add time attribute to GeoRSS and implement and visualization the GeoRSS feeds through Google Map and Timeline. A few apt illustrations were given to show the powerful functions of GeoRSS in syndicating the spatiotemporal information. GeoRSS leverages this teeming ecosystem for geospatial technology, and with OGC support, GeoRSS is on firm conceptual ground and gains exposure across the industry.