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Encryption usage by the federal government needs to be defined better, while GeoRSS offers the promise of geo-enabling RSS feeds with location information.

Embarrassing data losses by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service have led the Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum on encrypting personally identifiable information when it is taken away from the office.

Agencies have until August to comply with the OMB request. This will enable them to compensate for a lower level of physical security when data leaves the confines of a secure facility.

The data security company GuardianEdge released a white paper on the topic to assist those agencies in complying with OMB.

"This White Paper is a one-stop companion guide for completing the NIST security checklist and achieving the objectives set forth by the OMB memo, providing key information about how to properly identify and protect PII in a timely and cost-effective manner," the company said.

On the syndication side of the world, there is a new way to tag RSS feeds.

Called GeoRSS, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed it as a way for feed creators to place location information into those feeds.

The OGC GeoRSS White Paper discussed the proposal, and cited GeoRSS as "important stepping stone in the evolution of the geo-semantic web."

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has espoused the Semantic Web concept; it also has a place in a W3C project.

That project has noted challenges exist when it comes to placing geospatial information into online content; we think those challenges will exist for GeoRSS as well.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.