The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC): proposed GeoRSS Community Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is requesting public comment on the proposed GeoRSS Community Standard. 

First available in 2006, GeoRSS is a simple, yet powerful, approach for geo-enabling RSS/Atom feeds – that is, tagging them with location information. GeoRSS standardizes the way in which ‘where’ is encoded in feeds, so that applications can request, aggregate, share, and map geographic information from across the web. GeoRSS is extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML).

The initial goal for designing and documenting GeoRSS was to keep the encoding of geography on the Web from fracturing into various encodings, which would harm interoperability and restrict the flow of data. GeoRSS is also intended to be a lightweight way to express geography in other XML-based formats, including XHTML.

GeoRSS is the first OGC Community Standard to be released for public comment. An OGC Community Standard is an official position of the OGC endorsing a specification or standard developed external to the OGC. One key aspect of a Community standard is that the specification is broadly implemented. GeoRSS is implemented in thousands of products and applications. The submission of GeoRSS as a proposed Community Standard was at the request of various government organizations to be a stable reference point that can be normatively referenced by governments and other organizations.

The candidate GeoRSS Community Standard standard is available for public review and comment at https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/72442. Comments are due by 27th April 2017 and should be submitted to requests@lists.opengeospatial.org.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that ‘geo-enable’ the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.