Geographic coordinates (obtaining)
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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
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).