3 ms·

What about future GIs programs that can handle these digits, should we not futureproof anything that doesn't exactly utilize it today?

moron4hire 7y ago
It's not about software that can't handle the precision (the software can). It's about the message the false precision conveys. By stating a value out to that many decimal places, they are stating that the location is good to a millimeter. But the location was almost certainly captured by a GPS device that can only locate you down to a 5 meter radius. They've provided a value that implies a point, when they should be providing a value that defines a circle.
thelittlenag 7y ago
What would future proofing even look like? For me I think we need to move away from thinking first/primarily in terms of coordinates. Yes, I know that sounds silly but hear me out. Say someone is going out to meet a friend at a restaurant they haven't been to before, or perhaps they don't exactly recall the directions they took the last time -- how do they find directions? The first thing they most definitely do not do is say "hey maps app, tell me how to get to -37.80467681 144.9659498". There is a level of indirection we go through via the names of businesses, places, etc. So we ask, "tell me how to get to I Love Istanbul". And we hop through a number of steps mapping that unstructured name to some coordinate. But what if instead we used structured names instead of unstructured "names"? Then those names could map to a coordinate, or a street address, or well anything. What's more we could attach metadata to the name. This is what DNS does. Humans know the names. They are structured according to some simple to follow rules. And computers take care of mapping those names to IPs, as well as other metadata. Why not do exactly the same, but with locations? Re-use the same system but map to a coordinate? Or a region? Or whatever you need for your use case. If you did this you'd now have an L-NS instead of a D-NS. That's exactly the insight we've had at the startup I'm working at. [1] https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/

moron4hire 7y ago

It's not about software that can't handle the precision (the software can). It's about the message the false precision conveys. By stating a value out to that many decimal places, they are stating that the location is good to a millimeter. But the location was almost certainly captured by a GPS device that can only locate you down to a 5 meter radius. They've provided a value that implies a point, when they should be providing a value that defines a circle.

thelittlenag 7y ago

What would future proofing even look like? For me I think we need to move away from thinking first/primarily in terms of coordinates. Yes, I know that sounds silly but hear me out. Say someone is going out to meet a friend at a restaurant they haven't been to before, or perhaps they don't exactly recall the directions they took the last time -- how do they find directions? The first thing they most definitely do not do is say "hey maps app, tell me how to get to -37.80467681 144.9659498". There is a level of indirection we go through via the names of businesses, places, etc. So we ask, "tell me how to get to I Love Istanbul". And we hop through a number of steps mapping that unstructured name to some coordinate. But what if instead we used structured names instead of unstructured "names"? Then those names could map to a coordinate, or a street address, or well anything. What's more we could attach metadata to the name. This is what DNS does. Humans know the names. They are structured according to some simple to follow rules. And computers take care of mapping those names to IPs, as well as other metadata. Why not do exactly the same, but with locations? Re-use the same system but map to a coordinate? Or a region? Or whatever you need for your use case. If you did this you'd now have an L-NS instead of a D-NS. That's exactly the insight we've had at the startup I'm working at. [1] https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/