[Developers] mapping Zip codes to other location info?

[Karell Ste-Marie]

Hi Paul,

Well, it's not that bad, a zip code can have a "reference" long/lat for the
purpose of seeing the distance of one zip code versus another. Of course, it
is much more precise to measure the distance between my driveway and the
front of your house but for most applications I still think that the
long/lat addition to the zip code may be precise enough. In most web
applications that I've seen I will provide my zip code and it will use
long/lat from my zip code and compare that to the destination zip code and
calculate the distance between both. Of course, over a long distance this is
not very accurate since the earth is curved on the surface but some also
take that into account. Elevation is considered to be the holy grail in such
applications as well.

I do agree that the US's decision to go backwards on the international
standard is quite backwards, about as much as driving on the left side of
the road. But then we can always debate the imperial system versus the
metric system.

As for the separator being a dash, I can only completely agree.


-----------------------------------------------
Karell Ste-Marie
MCP, MCP+SB, MCP+I, MCAD, MCSE
http://karell.blogspot.com/
http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/n5d/
http://blog.bodybuilding.com/n5d


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Tomblin [mailto:ptomblin at xcski.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 1:46 PM
To: Karell Ste-Marie
Cc: developers at freebase.com
Subject: Re: [Developers] mapping Zip codes to other location info?

Quoting Karell Ste-Marie (karell.stemarie at gmail.com):
> What about adding the long/lat to the zip code?

It's unfortunate that there isn't any way to model a polygon
in Freebase, because a geographic boundary for the zip code region makes a
lot more sense than a single lat/long[1].  Especially since all the
physical objects in the zip code have their own lat/long which probably
doesn't correspond to whatever lat/long you assign to the zip code?


[1] And can I just say for the record that whoever decided that
Geolocation should have the longitude first and that the latitude and
longitude should be separated by a dash should be taken out and shot?
First of all, I know of no single application in the geographic world that
puts the longitude first.  Second of all, since there is a whole
hemisphere where the second number is negative, so separating the numbers
by a dash is visually confusing.

-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com> http://blog.xcski.com/
You mean [Exchange] was deliberately written?  I thought someone had
transcribed the writing on a football-stadium restroom wall, found
that it compiled, so shipped it.
              -- Tanuki