More than 90% of all news of the world refer to a place on our Planet.

With the latest geoRSS feed reader you can read, listen and view latest news on the map and use links to mentioned places.

ScreenshotThe geofeedExplorer displays colored icons for each news entry.

All sources have their individual color and icons and news entries are linked.

Feeds gets analyzed via URL parameter, some examples on usage are listed in this post: interesting-rss-feeds-for-geotagging.html. There is a list for all users with exciting RSS channels, registered users define their favorites in the extended profile editor.

How does this magic work?

The data processing is done at geonames.org and I like to greet Marc from here for his phantastic work.

First ExploreOurpla.net requests a single feed from geonames.org. The RSS feed is loaded and analyzed by a process called natural language geocoding driven by the RSS to GeoRSS Converter.

Many words have several meanings e.g. Java, so an important part is
Place Name Disambiguation. The RSS-to-GeoRSS-Converter checks the grammatical structure plus the context and detects the most interesting word as place or toponym, which may be for example a city, a volcano, a building or a country. All is done within seconds.

Next step searches the right coordinates as latitude and longitude from the 6 million rows database at geonames.org. Then transforming the RSS feed to an geoRSS feed, convert it to a JSON object and send it back to ExploreOurPla.net.

However, natural language processing is not perfect these days with current machines. A feedback process let users send suggestions to improve the geocoding. Geonames.org algorithm has reached an accuracy of better than 90% within a few weeks. Just mark a place name in an entry and click at place NOK (not ok). You may also give feedback when a place is correctly choosen from the algorithm, click OK then.

geofeedExplorer The commands ‘refresh’, ‘expand’, ‘collapse’ belong to all feeds.

Refresh loads the content fom geonames.org, gets the icon and choses a color.

Expanding a feed shows also the icons an the map, while collapsing hides the icons and feed entries. Clicking on a single entry title has same effect.

Icons and feed entries are linked. A single click opens the geofeedExplorer and sets the focus on the clicked entry. The icons show a mouse over tooltip with the title of the news entry.

An incrementing amount of RSS feeds have audio or video as multimedia content. The geofeedExplorer let users do geoPodCasting without an iPod.

Should I mention that best performance is achieved with FireFox and
Quicktime installed?

Have fun!