GeoRSS Home

This site describes a number of ways to encoding location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.

To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occured in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

At this point we have completed work on two encodings which we are calling GeoRSS GML and GeoRSS Simple. GeoRSS GML is a formal GML Application Profile. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used elsewhere. Conversely, other encodings such as GeoRSS Simple, could be used with Atom 1.0 or any other XML-based encoding of geography.

Finally, if you've come here simply looking for a way to encode a point in XML, use either the 'GML' or 'Simple' version:

Simple

45.256 -71.92

GML

  45.256 -71.92

If you want to know why, read on!