GeoNames and GeoRSS

I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but GeoNames.org has a pretty killer way of geocoding your RSS feed! This is particularly useful for converting your RSS feed to GeoRSS to be used in other products.

The way they do it is clever and very simple. Pass your feed’s URL in as a parameter to theirs and specify what type of output you want.

feedUrl	string (required)	The url of the RSS feed to search locations for and to convert to GeoRSS. The feed has to be syntactically correct, i.e. wellformed xml and valid rss/atom. Note : the feed url needs to be ‘url encoded‘.
feedLanguage	string (optional) en,de,fr,it,es	The language of the feed, this information is needed by the geonames search engine to find relevant locations. Default : No value = automatic language detection.
type	string (optional) rss_0.9, rss_0.91, rss_0.92, rss_0.93, rss_0.94, rss_1.0, rss_2.0, atom_0.3, atom_1.0kml	The output RSS dialect of the conversion. Default : same RSS dialect as input feed.With type=kml the output will be in GoogleEarth kml format.
geoRSS	string simple,gml,w3cGeo (optional)	The GeoRSS output encoding used for lat/lng. See www.georss.org for details. Default is w3cGeo.
addUngeocodedItems	true	Items that could not be geocoded are removed from the response document. Setting the parameter addUngeocodedItems=true will include the ungeocoded items in the response.
country	string (optional) two-letter iso country code	Restrict geocoding to a given country. This parameter may improve the results of the geocoder for feeds focusing on a single country.

I did a quick test using FEMA data and was able to display the data over a Google Map. The URL I passed in to Google is as follows.

http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://www.fema.gov/news/disasters_rss.fema&type=rss_2.0

Note that all I did was pass my feed URL in and then assign it as type rss_2.0. GeoNames geocoded everything for me and produced a valid GeoRSS feed that Google Maps understands. Piece of cake!

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