This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS and Atom feeds. As RSS and Atom become 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 occurred 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.
There are currently two encodings of GeoRSS: GeoRSS-Simple and GeoRSS-GML. GeoRSS-Simple is meant as a very lightweight format that developers and users can quickly and easily add to their existing feeds with little effort. It supports basic geometries (point, line, box, polygon) and covers the typical use cases when encoding locations. For a more feature-rich option, GeoRSS GML is a formal GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS-84 latitude/longitude. Both formats are designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used just as easily in non-RSS XML encodings.