Help with GeoRSS

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Michael Denslow

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to read a GeoRSS file using library rgdal and can't seem
to get it to work. I suspect that it is because I am not specifying
the layer = argument correctly (or the dsn). Am I missing something
obvious? I am not clear what goes into this argument for this type of
file.

Some sample code:

library(rgdal)
# says GeoRSS TRUE
ogrDrivers()
getGDALVersionInfo()
# [1] "GDAL 1.8.0, released 2011/01/12"

# ERROR says 'GDAL Error 4: Failed to read GeoJSON data'
ogrInfo(dsn='http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml',
? ? ? ?layer = 'USGS M 5+ Earthquakes')


Additionally, I am not sure why GDAL thinks the file is a GeoJSON. I also tried:

# OGRGeoJSON is apparently the predefined layer name
ogrInfo(dsn='http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml',
? ? ? ?layer = 'OGRGeoJSON')

My rgdal doesnt have geoRSS, but my command line ogrinfo says there's
one layer in the file, called 'georss', and if I get that layer info
it seems to work (note I've downloaded the XML file to my working
directory - maybe this fails as a URL...):

$ ogrinfo  eqs7day-M5.xml
Had to open data source read-only.
INFO: Open of `eqs7day-M5.xml'
      using driver `GeoRSS' successful.
1: georss (Point)


$ ogrinfo  eqs7day-M5.xml georss
Had to open data source read-only.
INFO: Open of `eqs7day-M5.xml'
      using driver `GeoRSS' successful.

Layer name: georss
Geometry: Point
Feature Count: 35

[here come the features]


So try layer="georss" in your ogrInfo (and hence readOGR) call...

Barry