Comments on: Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds

By: Brain Off » UNGIWG, meat on the bones. OpenStreetMap and the UNSDI. :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:28:13 +0000

[...] and Coordination group (their walls were plastered with real pirate maps). Elsewhere in the UN, UNOSAT and GeoNetwork have supported GeoRSS for a while now .. using the simplest thing that works and not [...]

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:15:06 +0000

Einar – great to hear that UNOSAT is embracing GeoRSS. Your disaster maps are generally excellent – the GeoRSS movement offers a completely different but complementary approach to sharing spatial data. Do you know if the UNGIWG discussions on SDI will include GeoRSS?

Tim – I love your website, and I could think of a very practical application for aid workers. Most of us carry mobile phones in the field , and if we were to set those phones up as you have, it would provide a cheap (although not 100% reliable) security monitoring system.

By: Tim Hibbard

Tim Hibbard — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 01:37:23 +0000

Hey! That’s me. Thanks for the link!

GeoRSS is very exciting. I like seeing weather agencies embracing it. I would like to see journalism do more with it. Being able to add a geographic layer to a news story enables localization. People really want to know what is happening in their back yard, and GeoRSS is a way of getting that information to those people quicker.

By: Einar Bjorgo

Einar Bjorgo — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:12:21 +0000

At UNOSAT we have been developing a special set of RSS feeds that do in fact include geographic coordinates for our maps. We will now move towards using GeoRSS. In case you do not subscribe to our RSS feeds, please see our website and see if it is of interest.

We now use RSS feeds (and inputs from ReliefWeb and AlertNet on our own website) in combination with GLIDE numbers to ensure automatic and interoperable services for example in the context of GDACS.