It's strange I did not blog about this locative packet thing which is tremendously interesting because of lcoation/xml/rdf/foaf :) It is about collaborative geoannotation at a Collaborative Mapping workshop at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2004 conference in San Diego, CA

The workshop's aggregator will offer a REST interface with a simple RDF/XML format for geoannotations, 'locative packets', with, we hope, the following aims:
- A simple XML serialisation that different applications can produce and consume, without even having to be RDF-aware.
- A shared 'protocol' which different applications can accept and send via HTTP POST, Jabber, ...
- Simple guidelines for RDF vocabularies to use in geoannotation.

Omitting the header which declares XML namespaces, this is a complete locative packet, in outline.

1: 2: 3: -0.0104 4: 51.2377 5: 6: Greenwich Observatory 7: It gets windy up there sometimes. 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13:

lines 3/4: WGS84 latitude and longitude, in decimal format

lines 6/7: title of, and text description of, your annotatation, using terms from the Dublin Core metadata initiative.

lines 9/11: the annotation is attributed to a person, using terms from the FOAF vocabulary for people.

If you want to annotate a space with more than text, packets can be annotated with media objects of any kind - Image, Sound, MovingImage, InteractiveResource etc. We offer the DCMI Type vocabulary provided by Dublin Core as a way of typing mediafor this purpose.

Here is an example in full of a locative packet with media object attached; it doesn't get more complex than this.

-0.0104 51.5722

Greenwich Observatory A cool but quite clear October afternoon in Greenwich Park. 2003-10-15T13:45:31+01:00