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Embedding Geographic Information in Web Pages

The main project I’m currently working on is a web site about food in the area I live in. It’s currently in testing and I’m quite a bit further behind on fixing it up to the point of opening it to the world than I’d like to be.

One feature that’s important to me to have in it is to mark pages that are associated with restaurants or other food-related organizations with their coordinates.

It turns out that there are several different ways to do this.

I’m currently using META tags in the HEAD section to specify geo.position, like this:

<head>
<meta name="geo.placename" content='Quechee, VT' />
<meta name='geo.position' content='43.645995,-72.416711' />
</head>

There are at least three other ways to do this:

The most amusing way to do it specify location information is to use the ICBM (”InterContinental Ballistic Missile” for the youngsters in the audience) META element in the HEAD section:

<head>
<meta name="ICBMÃ¢â‚¬Â content="43.645995,-72.416711Ã¢â‚¬Â³ />
</head>

(if these were real ICBM coordinates, we’d have to have an altitude as well).

Another way to do it is to use two separate meta tags:

<head>
<meta property="geo:lat">43.645995</meta>
<meta property="geo:long">-72.416711</meta>
</head>

Or, you can embed the information in the body:

<body>
<span style="display:noneÃ¢â‚¬Â xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">
<geo :lat>43.645995</geo><geo :long>-72.416711</geo>
</span>
</body>

I believe that there’s yet another way to do it using Dublin Core elements, as well, but I don’t have that handy.

I’ll probably add the ICBM and Dublin Core representations as well as the geo.position meta tags I’m currently using. Normally I’d be against having redundant information - if it’s generated manually, it’s too easy to forget to update some of the copies - but these pages are all generated by software, so it’s just a matter of adding a little bit to the templates.

Then there’s the matter of GeoRSS, allowing you to embed coordinates in RSS feeds. I’d also like to embed tags in the feeds (like del.icio.us does). GeoRSS looks pretty easy to do; I’m just not sure how to do it with Perl’s XML::RSS package, but I also haven’t really tried yet. I’ll post about it when I figure that out, and hopefully will be able to announce my food web site publicly soon.

Embedding Geographic Information in Web Pages

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