Geo (microformat)
Microformat to create metadata for location properties
Geo is a microformat used for marking up geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) in HTML (or XHTML). Coordinates are expected in angular units of degrees and geodetic datum WGS84. Although termed a "draft" specification, the format is a de facto standard, stable and in widespread use; not least as a sub-set of the published hCalendar and hCard microformat specifications, neither of which is still a draft.
Use of Geo allows parsing tools (for example other websites, or Firefox's Operator extension) to extract the locations, and display them using some other website or web mapping tool, or to load them into a GPS device, index or aggregate them, or convert them into an alternative format.
01Usage
- If latitude is present, so must be longitude, and vice versa.
- The same number of decimal places should be used in each value, including trailing zeroes.
The Geo microformat is applied using three HTML classes. For example, the marked-up text:
<div>Belvide: 52.686; -2.193</div>becomes:
<div class="geo">Belvide: <span class="latitude">52.686</span>; <span class="longitude">-2.193</span></div>by adding the class-attribute values "geo", "latitude" and "longitude".
This will display
Belvide: 52.686; -2.193
and a geo microformat for that location, Belvide Reservoir, which will be detected, on this page, by microformat parsing tools.
02hCard
03Extensions
There are three proposals, none mutually-exclusive, to extend the geo microformat:
- geo-extension, for representing coordinates on other planets, moons etc., and with non-WGS84 schema
- geo-elevation, for representing altitude
- geo-waypoint, for representing routes and boundaries, using waypoints
04Users
Organisations and websites using Geo include:
- Flickr, on over three million photo pages
- Geograph, on over one million photo pages
- Multimap, all map pages
- OpenStreetMap, wiki pages about places, GPS traces and diary entries
- Wikipedia, embedded in geo templates of map-link pages
- German Wikipedia, ditto
- Dutch Wikipedia, ditto
- Swedish Wikipedia, ditto
- Italian Wikipedia
- Wikivoyage
Multiple organisations publishing hCard include a geo as part of that.
05h-geo
An alternative to Geo, h-geo, has been proposed. This is applied using three HTML classes. For example:
<div class="h-geo">Belvide: <span class="p-latitude">52.686</span>; <span class="p-longitude">-2.193</span>; <span class="p-altitude">120</span></div>by adding the class-attribute values "h-geo", "p-latitude", "p-longitude", and "p-altitude".
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Geo (microformat)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- GeoGreatBarr.png by The original uploader was Pigsonthewing at English Wikipedia., GPL
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