GeoRSS - Spatial Miscellany

Mar 7, 2007 Got a Comment?

Mashups with AGX

Keith Fraley @ the Location Based Soup has written his first, in a series of 12, custom tasks for ArcGIS Explorer (AGX). When you download ArcGIS Explorer, you also have the option to download and install an ArcGIS Explorer software developer kit (SDK). The SDK allows developers to use the ArcGIS Explorer API to build their own custom tasks. This functionality means you’re not limited to just the default tasks that come out of the box with AGX, for example, you could build your own custom version of the ‘create notes’ task, or something far more exciting that makes the most of your data.

British Gent consuming a mash-up, circa 1950.

Keith has worked from the USGS GeoRSS sample task in the SDK to build his own task that queries a web service and geo-locates items listed on the auction website eBay. The USGS GeoRSS sample task Keith used from the SDK makes a web request to the USGS for a GeoRSS file which details recent earthquakes. Using a combination of the .NET framework classes, XPath, and the AGX API, the GeoRSS file is parsed by the task, pertinent information regarding each earthquake is extracted, and represented in AGX as a PlaceResult.

The ArcGIS Explorer SDK is available for free as part of ArcGIS Server 9.2, and you can build custom tasks for AGX with Microsoft Visual Studio – the free edition is pretty useful.

Feb 12, 2007 Got a Comment?

|pipes.yahoo.com|

A few people are posting on their first attempts at using ‘Pipes’ – the latest web offering from Yahoo. Pipes provides an online, user friendly GUI, to mix and match RSS data – the name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes. I played around a little with it at the weekend and am impressed. Mikal has documented his attempt to generate a GeoRSS feed which locates any blogs that are discussing a particular technorati tag…he also contemplates some of the functionality Pipes might embrace in the future.

One thing I’d really like Pipes (or a similar service) to offer is a web based graphical interface with code behind that best guesses the XSL file required to get from one flavour of XML to another, or allows the user to match elements in each of the XML files in a ‘drag and drop’ fashion. Maybe it’s already out there and I haven’t found it? I think it would be really useful service, especially for people who don’t work with XML and XPath on a daily basis, helping to transform XML datasets into a format they can use.