[geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?

[Dave Kimmel]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, David Cantrell wrote:

> Won't work.  Consider that some countries are tall and thin (eg Italy),
> others like Russia are short and fat, whilst others are square, like France.
> Then consider that really small countries can border much larger countries,
> such as Andorra bordering Spain and France.  A single co-ordinate pair
> for each country will be silly, as something like a sixth of Spain is closer
> to the centre of Andorra than to the centre of Spain, and that a circle
> centred on Rome and big enough to cover all of Italy will also cover one
> entire French department (Corsica), San Marino, Monaco, Vatican, possibly
> Malta, and parts of Switzerland, Slovenia, Albania, Montenegro, etc.  And
> a circle big enough to contain Russia will also cover - well, all of Asia.

Actually, for what I'm doing it seems to work well enough.  My whole goal
was to find something that I could feed a city,province,country to and get
a lat/long for that city in that province in that country.  In my case,
the country will always be Canada and (currently) the province will always
be Alberta.  I found something via the Government of Canada web site that
does the exact job I want.  Now I'm just working on scripting it and
feeding it into our database.

I agree that doing this for *just* a country, or even just a province,
would be pretty pointless.  I think that a single coordinate pair for any
*area* of land isn't the right thing to do, but for my purposes its good
enough.

-- Dave Kimmel
   crisco_kid at shaw.ca