GeoRSS draft for encoding geographic features

Draft for Encoding Geographic Features in GeoRSS

Motivation

GeoRSS already offers a couple of encodings to add geometrical features such as points, lines, polygons and boxes to RSS. Encodings for geographical features such as country, state/province, city or postal codes are still lacking in GeoRSS.
Encodings for these geographical entities would help feed producers encode geographical information in cases where the geometrical encodings don't make sense. If a feed entry for example is referring to a country, it does not make sense to add lat/lng, nor does it make sense to add the country borders as a polygon.

Example

<georss:where>
   <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>
   <georss:countryCode>AU</georss:countryCode>
   <georss:regionCode>NSW</georss:regionCode>
   <georss:city>Wollongong</georss:city>
   <georss:postalCode>2500</georss:postalCode>
   <georss:address>1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW</georss:address>
</georss:where>

countryCode : two-letter ISO 3166 country code
regionCode : national first level subdivisions (state, canton, region, province, prefecture) as in ISO 3166-2
city : city, township, shi (JP)
postalCode : postal code, zip
address : address as text

Open Issues

do we need feature types (lake, mountain, populated place,...).

Other related encodings

IETF : http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-geopriv-dhcp-civil-09.txt
Cons : Too complex for our needs (we don't need room numbers ...); naming the elements A1 - A6 is quite confusing
opengeospatial : http://schemas.opengeospatial.net/ows/1.0.0/ows19115subset.xsd
Cons : it is not clear whether they use codes for country and region.
oasis-open : http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/download.html
Cons : a 90 pages specification : as they write in the specification "Important: Use only elements and attributes that make sense to you. Ignore the rest that are needless for you."
microformat : http://microformats.org/wiki/adr
Yahoo! Maps : http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/simple/V1/reference.html
Cons : US specific, not usable internationally (example : postal codes are strings in the UK and not integer)

Document History

2006 August 20, added link to Yahoo! Maps
2006 August 16, added link to adr microformat.
0.1 draft, 2006 June 11, based on emails by Ray Singh,Tom Kralidis and Carl Reeds, edited by Marc Wick