microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges”

geo

status

draft

authors

• Tantek Çelik

Description

Geo (pronounced “gee-oh”) enables publishers to add geodata about the location of a person, place, event, thing and so on to a page.

Geo is in fact a 1 to 1 representation of the “geo” property in vcard, and so a subset of hCard.

geo microformatted content has a root element with the name “geo” and two properties, longitude and latitude.

Usage

Use the geo format to indicate a geographic location. The geo specification noted that

If the publisher knows and is publishing the address of the location, OR if the address of the location was what was actually entered by a human, and the publisher simply turned that into lat/long using some sort of a service, then the publisher SHOULD use adr to publish the actual human entered address information since that communicates far more semantic information than a simple geo lat/long coordinate

Examples

There are two forms of the geo microformat. A standard “compound” microformat like this <span class=”geo”> <span class=”latitude”>27.976628</span>, <span class=”longitude”>86.933302</span> </span> And an abbreviated form when the longitude and latitude shouldn’t actually be visible, but still be machine readable. For example Apollo 11 splashed down <abbr title=”13.150000;169.150000″ class=”geo”>400 miles (640 km) South West of Wake Island, in the North Pacific Ocean</abbr>

Tools

• Brian Suda has an XSLT service which extracts geo data, and can mash it up with Google Maps: http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/geo/
• Operator, from Michael Kaply, is an extension for Firefox 2, which extracts geo data from a page, and enables various actions on it. http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator/

Services using

• Flickr uses geo for all geotagged photos (and provides a drag and drop interface for geotagging)
• Multimap uses geo to publish the location of a location search result http://www.multimap.com/
• Two open guide projects, openguides http://openguides.org/ and wikitravel http://wikitravel.org/, use the geo microformat for publishing location geodata