January 01
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Safe Software’s FME 2007 Release to Include GeoRSS Support
February 08, 2007 |
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Company: Safe Software, Inc.
 Vancouver, British Columbia: February 8, 2007: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has become a common way to publish and share information. Now imagine being able to visualize the traffic in any given city before facing your commute or tracking and responding to unfolding disasters in any given region. By adding location to RSS, the emergence of GeoRSS is providing a way to integrate and share spatial and non-spatial data, and Safe Software’s FME® 2007 will make it easy to read and write GeoRSS/RSS feeds. "Safe Software’s support of GeoRSS allows FME users to take advantage of one of the web's newest methods of disseminating spatial information – RSS or Atom feeds that include location information,' said Don Murray, Safe Software's co-founder and President. "GeoRSS is simply RSS with location information and is a great way to quickly and simply distribute small amounts of spatial information to a wide audience. We've already begun to use it ourselves to communicate the locations of our upcoming FME training sessions.' FME's GeoRSS reader and writer support both RSS and Atom feeds, and all of the three current GeoRSS standards for encoding geographical data in a feed: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Geo, GeoRSS Simple and GeoRSS GML Profile. Using FME's GeoRSS reader, regularly updated information provided by any geo-tagged feed becomes just another data source to FME, enabling users to work with the data quickly and easily. The feed could be loaded into a database or overlaid and displayed on a custom base map, either in FME's Universal Viewer, or in an FME-supported mapping application. FME's GeoRSS writer allows users to publish their own GeoRSS feeds to their own websites. For example, a municipality could use the GeoRSS writer to easily make available GeoRSS feeds of timely events such as fire calls, new building or subdivision permits, and new business licenses. Although this is newly evolved technology, examples of GeoRSS feeds that are already publicly available include recent earthquake occurrences, regional traffic congestion reports and upcoming events hosted in recreational and cultural facilities. A number of free and very easy to use tools are also emerging that allow the information contained in GeoRSS feeds to be visualized in a mashup and shared with others. Example mashups showing FME training course locations from a GeoRSS feed created with FME are available at tinyurl.com/yqcxsd and tinyurl.com/ys3e4m. The GeoRSS reader and writer is available in the FME 2007 beta (http://www.safe.com/beta). For more information on FME's GeoRSS support or to learn more about GeoRSS, visit www.safe.com/georss. More about Safe Software and FME Safe Software Inc. is the leader in Spatial ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) technologies, providing both spatial data transformation solutions and professional services. Since 1993, Safe Software has focused on helping organizations enhance access to spatial data by providing software solutions that deliver seamless translation and transformation of nearly 200 GIS, CAD, raster and database formats. Safe Software is also the maker of FME, a universal spatial data translation and transformation product that manages the complex data format and schema transformations often required to access and distribute location-based data. FME manages database loading, data extraction from legacy systems, merging multiple data sources, coordinate system conversion, and format to format translation for the exchange of map data. FME consists of four major components: a translation engine (FME Universal Translator), a graphical authoring environment (FME Workbench), a data inspection tool (FME Viewer), and application extenders that directly integrate into a variety of spatial applications. Visit www.safe.com for more information. FME is a registered trademark of Safe Software Inc. Catherine Ducharme (catherine.ducharme@safe.com) |
