Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
city
(e.g.
'Washington'
as
in
DC).14
Michael
Young, blog post, December 9, 2012
The information is then geocoded with latitude and
longitude references to be plotted on a map.
This data-collection method can be used in addition to
other sources. So, for example, the designers of the
HealthMap application (Table 4.1, map no. 13) adopt a mixed
data-collection strategy, combining RSS feeds and content
scraping:
We use both news aggregator services and direct
RSS feeds from news sources to collect our data.
We also do some 'screen scraping', i.e. parsing the
raw HTML from Websites for some sources. Clark
Freifeld, interview by email, April 13, 2012
Although most of the data come from RSS feeds or
news-aggregating APIs, the designers of this application
have added data obtained by extracting the HTML code.
4.1.3.2. RSS feeds
“RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data
automatically” 15 . The RSS, but also ATOM formats facilitate
syndicating the content to get updates from the Websites via
an RSS feed reader 16 . For instance, HealthMap (Table 4.1,
map no. 13) uses RSS format to localize information about
epidemics, mainly from Google News.
The RSS feed format makes the data, originating
mainly in online blogs, interoperable. In theory, they do not
require to be modified before being used. Nevertheless,
14 See: http://81nassau.com/blog/2005/12/09/ap-news-google-maps-mashup.
15 RSS article, Wikipedia. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS.
16 An alternative to the RSS format which is also adapted to the
processing of geographic data is the GeoRSS format. This format includes
the geographic coordinates of the location in question as metadata within
the RSS thread.
 
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