[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia as a gazetteer

Fri Jul 21 09:08:39 UTC 2006

Hi!
> Working with co-ordinates has made me wonder about their use. It seems
> a bit bizarre to represent a huge country (or ocean, river, etc) with
> one random dot. Is there any neat, standardised way to refer to
> geographic areas? I can't think of one...any ideas?

For places larger than a village it should really be a collection of points.
Or one central point and a radius, but this would require the shape to be
regular. A single point would be acceptable for a small village (it usually
coincides with the main square, or the main administrative centre) but it's
hardly going to represent places like NYC... A collection of waypoints is
used to track a route on navigation, so it should be an acceptable system to
deliver a canal or a river shape, possibly a long road. Dealing with
mountains you'd want to have at least a collection of the main peaks. In
many ways you can think of an ocean as a "negative mountain", in which depth
can be used pretty much in the same way, but if you need dynamics (currents)
on your map, then you are going to need both a collection of rough reference
points and a directional vector, possibly an estimation of involved volumes,
temperatures, etc.

I cannot tell how a collection of points can be connected with a
cartographic source thru a template, though. It looks as a pretty nasty job.
That's unless we may come to have a source for free maps (say just
geographical relief), on which we can draw shapes based on co-ordinates. At
that point all you need is to anchor your marks to the coordinates of the 4
corners of the map. I know it's used to show the position of towns and
villages on a map, but I haven't seen it used to "draw rivers", yet. Would
come very handy to model maps based on real data, when dealing with things
like "El Nino" or the Gulf stream. It might also be used to model birds
migration.

Bèrto