GeoRSS describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.

To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occured in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created http://georss.org/ to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and “upwards-compatibility” across encodings.

At this point we have completed work on two encodings which we are calling GeoRSS Pro and GeoRSS Simple. Pro is derived from GML, and is a formal GML Application Profile. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used elsewhere. Conversely, other encodings such as GeoRSS Simple, could be used with Atom 1.0 or any other XML-based encoding of geography.