I was happy to hear Charile’s news of the first successful Geo Web Rest interoperability day. I had seen Christopher’s post about a GeoRSS/AtomPub demo over at MetaCarta Labs earlier, and just had to spend some time checking it out.
Being the cultured guy that I am, I chose to engage is some highly artistic feature editing in this demo:
The OpenLayers demo is highly responsive. The editing tools are intuitive, and even the node insertion feature is well implemented. What is most impressive though is what is going on in the background. Every time you insert/update a feature, an AtomPub operation is triggered. The data that is stored via these operations is (of course) also available as a GeoRSS feed, allowing you to view it in any RSS browser, or even in Google Maps:
If you look close, you will see that Kilroy’s nose’s shape changed between the two screen shots. In the two minutes it took me to get back to take a screenshot of my beautiful artwork in the original interface, some vandal had come by and given him a huge proboscis. :)
I did suffer from some disappointment in my experimentation, though not with this service. I tried to pull this feed through Yahoo Pipes and do something interesting with it, and belatedly remembered how poor their GeoRSS support is. If anyone from Yahoo is listening: please add support for full GeoRSS geometries. Points don’t cut it any more.
Anyway, in my opinion this represents the future of GIS interoperability. Look at how AtomPub ties in with some of the service chaining (featureserver/spatialreference/yahoopipes/fme) stuff I mentioned yesterday. As richer client tools such as Google Earth and other proprietary and open source desktop GIS begin to play ball, I believe that we will see a revolution in social mapping. Anyone not paying attention had better smarten up. It’s no longer about ignoring the elephant; now it’s about getting out from under the steamroller.
-J
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