GeoRSS ::
Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds. Simply put

GeoRSS is a way of relating Web content to Earth features.

What's nice about this GeoRSS specification is that it outlines ways to define points lines, and boundaries of areas. For example, defining the outline of a county, a hiking trip, or the like. Then one could do semantic searches for information within a boundary.

Example, the state publishes an RSS feed of news for the state. This news could be related to trails, counties, watersheds, cities, ports, etc. Users could supply a query for any information that intersects their neighborhood.

Other features of the spec include specifying taxonomy based tags on the 'feature' of the location (mountain, river, lake), though without any kind of suggested vocabulary, this doesn't seem as useful.

I wonder what happens if multiple regions apply. For example, a country that is split over multiple islands, but doesn't really include the area between the islands.

This is via the new SlashGISRS, In+ersec+ion for Spatial People. It's a slash-style news site for geo-news. Yay, more stuff to read.

I'll try and add this functionality to my Travelog