Downstream thoughts on GeoRSS with CIQ v3.0

[colin.wallis@ssc.govt.nz]

Dear TC
Some late thoughts from a subject matter expert in the NZ geospatial community that we asked to help us review that part of the spec that might be worth sharing..

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Liz,

Sorry for taking so long to answer .... I had a quick look at the doc and the xml, and it looks good. I suppose I have only two points to make:

1)      You need to support GeoRSS GML (GeoRSS Simple is less useful) as it includes support for lines and polygons. Also both Virtual Earth and Google Maps/Earth now support GeoRSS GML, so for linking back to those systems will be very useful, and probably the way world is going

2)      You need to support the latest version (I think you already do as it is v3). You will need to come up with plans on how to keep up with new versions  my gut feeling is that there will be several versions now that the two big ones (Microsoft and Google) has started using GeoRSS as a mechanism to load vector data into their engines on fly

You should also look into KML  it is a standard Google started, especially useful on loading 3D data into Google Earth. It has been embraced by all traditional GIS vendors like ESRI and Mapinfo  their flagship desktop products allow you to export/import and view KML, thus enabling feed into and back to Google Earth. Furthermore, next version of Virtual Earth will support it too, so it is becoming de-facto standard.