[wp-hackers] Re: Place, Geotagging

[Mike Schinkel]

Here are some interesting followup URLs:

http://geotags.com/geobot/add-tags.html 
http://geotags.com/geo/DMS3.html
http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html#region

For example: 

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude"> 
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name"> 
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

e.g. 
<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="49.2;-123.4"> 
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="London, Ontario"> 
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="CA-ON">

Of course that doesn't provide an exact match to a City/Place which would be
very useful. Problem is, I guess, that there is no standard list of places.
I did find "Natural Area Code" but it is proprietary:
http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/licensing/

One option for place would be to include a URL-encoded Wikipedia title, i.e.
"New_York_City" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City) and
"Atlanta,_GA" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta,_GA). And if there is no
wikipedia page for a city well it's about time for someone to add it, eh?

One problem here is there is no *guarantee* that the Wikipedians won't up
and change a place's URL (i.e. they might change NYC to be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City,_NY for example.) Still I'd be
willing to bet on Wikipedia being close to authoritative than any other
source.  Maybe the meta could be: 

<META NAME="wikipedia.city" CONTENT="New_York_City"> 
<META NAME="wikipedia.city" CONTENT="Atlanta,_GA"> 

Or better yet?

<META NAME="wikipedia.en.city" CONTENT="London, Ontario"> 
<META NAME="wikipedia.en.city" CONTENT="Atlanta,_GA"> 

Thoughts?

-Mike Schinkel 
http://mikeschinkel.com


-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com
[mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Alex Dunae
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 4:53 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-hackers] Re: Place, Geotagging

> There would be real benefit for a defacto-standard method to emerge. 
> WP has enough market-share to start seeing that happen.

There already seems to be a de facto standard for geo-tagging entire
sites: the GeoURL ICBM Address Server.  They use a simple meta tag and I've
seen it all over the web.

See http://geourl.org/

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