Mapping NOAA Incidents Using Open Source Tools
In a recent ArcExplorer Blog, the process of displaying a GeoRSS feed was outlined using the ArcExplorer desktop tool. (For some background on GeoRSS read this). I have always thought that the immediate application of GeoRSS could be for the generation of web-base news sites with embeddeble maps. But I have not seen this mentioned much on the data journalism sites. Perhaps GeoRSS is not as useful as previously thought.
The GeoRSS feed identified and experimented with, was generated from the following website maintained by NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration.
This site is very interesting in and of itself as you can download incident information as .CSV (Comma Separated Value) file; which can easily be posted to a variety of web-mapping resources.
I decided to try and see if I could work with the GeoRSS feed using an open-source mapping tool. I did attempt unsuccessfully to integrate the feed generated here to the MapChannel site (without much success - but then again I have never used MapChannels before). One disappointing outcome of this experiment was to find that Umapper no longer supports GeoRSS feeds as an imcoming feed source. I also attempted to use both on-line offerings from ESRI, (ArcGIS online and ArcExplorer online) but neither was able to parse the incoming GeoRSS feed.
I settled on trying to use the GeoCommons site to see if I could map the incoming feed. If you are not familiar with this site - I recommend it for the visualization of .CSV, .SHP and Google Fusion tables as outlined in this post. This site did allow for the upload of the RSS feed generated at the NOAA site. During the upload process, designate your data hyperlink as a GeoRSS enabled feed.
Steps:
1. First on the NOAA site: right click the feeds on the right (I chose the RSS feed).
2. On the GeoCommons site, click on Upload Data. Once the Upload Data page opens, choose "Add URL Link". (make an account on this site to upload data for mapping)
3. Paste the link and from the dropdown designate it as a GeoRSS feed. Click Continue.
4. I found the GeoCommons site parsed the incoming XML really well - it did not appear that I lost any data. I chose to map to the US Boundary set rather than the world as the points are primarily in the United States. (see the dropdown at the bottom of the page once the GeoCommons site parses the data).
4. I described my dataset by providing Meta-Data detail about the source of the information. (GeoCommons is a Volunteered Geographic Information site - Meta-Data counts!)
5. Once the dataset was loaded, I mapped it using the various methods available from the site. See the result below. (The embed unfortunately does not do this justice - may need to follow the link here: http://geocommons.com/maps/108631 to have a better idea of the outcome.)
**The Geocommons site made automatically available the option to use the time of the incident to generate a time-base animation.
Enjoy!
