GeoNames Forum

Hi, is this web service able to recognize coordinates in an rss and use them to convert the rss to georss? Is there a mask of coordinates that enables the service to recognize them? E.g. "N47.12345, E19.12345" is likely the location of a place

coordinate masks are not yet supported by the rss to georss service.

Marc

... but it would be great to have, and - I assume - not that complicated to develope, right? Come on, guys

Do you have a particular feed in mind?

The mask above would not be difficult to implement, but how many masks are we supposed to be able to parse? Do you have more examples for masks you consider important?

I am thinking of RSS feeds that belong to blogs. Typically, these blogs are related to geocaching, mountaineering, etc. Regarding the mask to be supported, I guess the same logic used by Google Maps to search for locations is fine. It is 47.12345, 19.12335
Both lat and lon can be negative, and are meant to be DD.DDDDD format. Google Maps help says: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=18539&query=coordinates&topic=&type=

Do you have a concrete blog in mind? A real world feed we could use for testing. (Of course we could use the RSS feed of this thread, but I would like to see some real world examples).

Actually, I would love to have this feature for my own purpose: I want to geocode my blog posts. The feed is http://adszhu-gg.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, currently there are only a few posts for testing purpose. I have already tried to find forums or blogs with several items containing coordinates in the title, but have not found any good example. I keep on searcing and send You the URL as soon as I find one.

One thing that strikes me here is this is what Microformats should be for

http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

... so encourage the blog creator to use microformats to tag the locations, (if they not already using GeoRSS - which this tool does maintain

- and then geonames only has to support parseing out a microformat.

more...
http://highearthorbit.com/a-proposal-georss-kml/
(unifing the various standards)

... alas I dont have any feeds to test this on

... although the geonames rss parser does have a 'place in the market' for taking arbitrtay text and marking it up to standarsd (eg surrounding identified coordinates with the microformat for other services to consume)

(Marc I'll forward you some regexp's I have for identifing arbiray coordinates in free text, that I have used in a prototype geographic search engine - alas before it was recently patented

Thank You for the info, I'll study and apply them in my blogspace!

Barryhunter,
Since the mobile geobloggers (cool name, right?) typically use thin mail clients to post to their blogs, they will not be able to edit html. Is it enough to put the coordinates in the following format so that it could be parsed?

GEO:37.386013;-122.082932

Do you have the option to add tags?

If so could use the following tags:

geo:lat=51.4989
geo:lon=-0.1786

that are fairly standard, and no reason geonames cant easily parse that.

In order to my experiences, rss-to-georss takes the "title", only. The mobile geobloggers operate in the following way:
- they send an e-mail (from PDA or via MMS) to their blog account
- the message appears as a post on the blog
- the RSS of the blog gets updated
- the webservice is called to convert the RSS to GEORSS, finds the title of the post (originally the subject of the mail), parses it and returns the completed xml
- links calling Google Maps with the GEORSS as an input parameter can instantly show the blog posts on the map. My sample feed has been created in this way

Is it OK, do You think, to put the following line in the subject field of the mail, meaning the "title" segment of the RSS:

geo:lat=51.4989 geo:lon=-0.1786

? That would be easy to get used to

the geonames rss-to-georss evalutes both title and description of a feed item. The format geo:lat=51.4989 geo:lon=-0.1786 is pretty simple to parse, no problem to add this feature to the converter.

Marc

Wow, I'll be the first who uses the ws to put on the map points defined by coordinates in my blogposts!!!

By the way, there must be something with the RSS generated by blogger.com, as the ws could only handle place names in the title. But it is nothing, I can live with it

rss to georss is now parsing the geo:lat format :
http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.geonames.org%2Fgforum%2Frss%2FtopicPosts%2F509.page

There was indeed something amiss with the atom output from blogger preventing it from parsing the feed body. This problem is also fixed with the newest release.

Marc

Yes, both the geo microformat recognition and the message body parsing work fine.
Thanks a lot, I am sure a lot of people will make use of this great new feature!