Geographic coordinates (obtaining)
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Methods to obtain geographic coordinates of a place include:
- Category:Lists of coordinates
- Manually:
- On the web:
- Multimap (http://www.multimap.com/) provides geographic coordinates of a location selected from a map.
- The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/) 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 (http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_query.gnis_web_query_form) service is extremely extensive. It also provides linkouts to topozone and terraserver so that you can tweak the results to your liking.
- For Australian placenames, try Geoscience Australia Place Name Search (http://www.ga.gov.au/map/names/)
- 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
Regardless of the source of coordinates, good practise is to evaluate whether they appear reasonable at first glance.
See also Geographic coordinate system
[edit]
External links
- Census Gazetteer: to identify U.S. places with coordinates (http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer).
- Getty TGN coordinates of places all over the world (http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn).
