Saturday, November 24, 2007

Geo Annotated Indian news

Many Indian news sources (well, all of them) ,lack proper geo annotation standards This is a small experiment to correct it .
I Used Yahoo pipes ,Google maps and Geonames.org...

PS:This news is computer generated(reaped off "The Hindu" news paper ); so, many errors might creep in...

Also Note ,That sometimes the news does not load if your Internet connection is slow....



View Larger Map

The trick :
RSS to GeoRSS converter:

geonames.org is a geocoding service ,to put it simply ,you can type in a city,State name ,and get the geographic co-ordinates of almost all well known places.

It also offers this feature as a webservice.

One of it's services ,Is the RSS-to-GEORSS converter
http://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html
It takes in any RSS feed as an input ,scans the RSS feed, and gives out a geoRSS feed as the result...

Not much has been mentioned as to how it analyzes the content ,Maybe it searches the Title and Description Tags...;so I have made sure ,that I transform the yahoo Pipe appropriately

The pipe can be accessed at
http://pipes.yahoo.com/jynn/geoannotatedindia

Please note :I have used output from several sub pipes for this,all of them are published please look into the source...