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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] How do we want to define locales?
  • Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 22:46:40 -0700

Chad Knepp wrote:

. what about topography? Hopefully we could find/make a
utility to translate ZIP/Postal code to Lat/Long or some such...

http://www.hmssurprise.org/Resources/whereami.html
Where Am I?
How to determine latitude and longitude given a street address, city, state,
province, territory, country or whatever.

Below are a handful of sites for finding your coordinates from your street
address or by use of interactive map generation:

Maporama
http://www.maporama.com
Worldwide: The easiest source for latitude and longitude. Select a country, and enter the address as completely as you desire. The latitude and longitude information appears below the map both in degree, minutes, seconds (° ' ") and decimal degrees formats.

Maptech MapServer
http://mapserver.maptech.com/homepage/
U.S. only: Another easy source for latitude and longitude. Enter the city and state or zip code. Click on the Go! button. Pan and zoom to find the desired location. The latitude and longitude reflecting the location of the cursor appears in degrees:minutes:seconds (° ' ") in the fields to the left of the map.

Eagle Geocoder
http://www.geocode.com/modules.php?name=TestDrive_Eagle
U.S. only: Another easy source for latitude and longitude. Enter the U.S. address, as completely as you wish. Highlight either Address Info (the default) or Address & Map. Click on the request button. The latitude and longitude information appears both in decimal degrees and degrees:minutes:seconds formats.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/
UK only: Latitude and longitude are displayed in the legend below the map. E.g.: ( N51:30:50 W0:06:37 WGS84) which can also be written 51°30'50" N, 0°6'37" W.

http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer-tbl
U.S. only: Enter the U.S. place name or ZIP code. Click on search. Click on
map and use the pan and zoom features to zero in on your location.

Or, click on the Tiger image above to go directly to the Tiger Map Server Browser. Good for finding a location based on given latitude and longitude values (decimal form).
Confirm your Coordinates
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp

Worldwide: Enter a latitude and longitude pair to get a map with a marker at
those coordinates. Remember, south and west are negative.
To convert decimal form to degrees/minutes/seconds: A conversion script.

Take the decimal part of the coordinate and multiply by 60. This gives
you minutes.
Take the decimal part of the minutes and multiply by 60, round to the
nearest integer. This gives you seconds.

Example: 50.802248 N x 1.111330 W

50.802248

-> 50° + 60 x 0.802248 = 48.13488'
-> 50° 48' + 60 x 0.13488 = 8.0928"
-> 50° 48' 8"

1.111330

-> 1° + 60 x 0.111330 = 6.6798'
-> 1° 6' + 60 x 0.6798 = 40.788"
-> 1° 6' 41"

50° 48' 8" N x 1° 6' 41" W ( Portsmouth Harbour, Portsmouth, GB, location of
HMS Victory )

Remember that one minute of latitude is one nautical mile ( one nautical mile = 6080 ft., one statute mile = 5280 ft. ). Minutes of longitude are less... smaller the further one gets from the equator.
Adding decimal places doesn't help. Also, the various sites don't always
agree, and my GPS receiver disagrees with them all.







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