Geographic coordinates (obtaining)
From Free net encyclopedia
Methods to obtain geographic coordinates of a place include:
- Category:Lists of coordinates
- Manually:
- On the web:
- Google Maps can be used to find coordinates. Find the place you require coordinates for, and double click on it to centre the map around that point. Then click the "link to this page" link, and the coordinates (in degrees and parts of a degree in decimals) appear in the address bar, eg "http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51.455558,-2.605047&spn=0.032304,0.069523". In this case the latitude is 51.455558, and the longitude is -2.605047. The reverse is possible by entering the lat and long into the search bar, with a space between them.
- MSN maps provides geographical coordinates of a location selected from their excellent maps (better than Multimap) if you know the trick. The trick is: First find the feature or the location you want to know the geographical coordinates of, either by manually using the map and zooming in or by entering it into the search field (first click on "Find a Place", then choose Place name in: World Atlas, then choose the right feature from the list). As soon as you approximately see the feature on the map, zoom in as far as possible or necessary. Then, left-click exactly into the center of the feature/area you want to know the geographical coordinate of. Then wait for a short while until the map is rebuilt. Then, right-click on the map wherever you want, choose "properties" and wait for a short while until a pop-up tab appears. In this pop-up tab, the geographical coordinates are already written (in degrees only). Then perform a "select all"-"copy". The degrees-only geographical coordinates can be directly entered into Wikipedia's {{coor d||N/S||E/W|}}-Template. In the preview, click on the template and you will get to the page http://kvaleberg.com/extensions/mapsources/index.php?params=... . There, the degrees-only geographical coordinates are converted into degrees-minutes-seconds anyway and displayed automatically at the top of the page, so you can still decide if you want to convert the degrees-only-geographical coordinates into the degree-minutes-seconds-format (alternatively, you can also use the website http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/trigonometryRealms/degMinSec/degMinSec.htm for the conversion from degrees-only into degree-minutes-seconds).
- Multimap provides geographic coordinates of a location selected from a map, and many scientific calculators (including the one that comes with Windows, use dms and inv dms) will do these conversions as well.
- The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names allows you to find coordinates with a place name search.
- http://www.world-gazetteer.com provides geographic coordinates of many cities (select country - "cities" - city)
- For US coordinates, USGS GNIS service is extremely extensive. It also provides linkouts to topozone and terraserver so that you can tweak the results to your liking.
- For US addresses, A2B provides you with the latitude and longitude of a US street address and returns nearest websites to that address. You can then add your own sites.
- For Australian placenames, try Geoscience Australia Place Name Search
- For placenames in Antarctica, try Geographic Names Information System, Antarctica
- Looking at a website built by GPS users, e.g. http://geourl.org/ or http://www.findu.com/ or http://www.geocaching.com/
- Looking for GPS "Waypoint" files
- Googleing for the city name together with "latitude", "longitude", which will give hits like http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001769.html
- Looking at a wiki that uses map coordinates, e.g.http://susning.nu/
- Zooming in on the place on TerraServer-USA and getting the values at left
- Offline software:
- NASA World Wind has a limited database of U.S. and global placenames. Sorry, no street addresses. Press Ctrl-F, enter the official place name, click Search, you will probably find the place you're looking for. Click Go and press Ctrl-C to copy the decimal coordinates. Paste it into Wikipedia. Example: For Tucson International Airport → "worldwind://goto/world=Earth&lat=32.11611&lon=-110.94109&alt=24389"
- On GISWiki has been the Tool hjl_get_Coor developed, that takes the coordinates from a Google Map and builds the
{{coor d|...}}or<geo>...</geo>markup.
There is a version for the english and german Wikipedia available.
Regardless of the source of coordinates, good practise is to evaluate whether they appear reasonable at first glance.
[edit]
See also
[edit]