[Vorbis-dev] gps tags in vorbis comments

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Ralph Giles <giles at xiph.org> wrote:
> On 9-Sep-08, at 1:02 PM, Stefan Kost wrote:
>
>> Thats a great sugestion. So what about leaving LOCATION as it is
>> (human readable location) and adding a bundled GEO_LOCATION field.
>> I've updated the wiki
>
> I like this better than the separate fields. But really, I think it
> should also be possible to use more conventional reprenstations in
> the GEO_LOCATION tag, like
>
> GEO_LOCATION=49°17'42" N, 123°8'23" W, 12m
> GEO_LOCATION=47° 37' 31" N - 58° 40' 55" W
> GEO_LOCATION=S42.804718 E147.438732 H44.756
> and so on.
>
> Is there a geotag parsing library that does all this already?

Then you'll obligate all applications to use a particular parsing
library or just be broken with respect to some subset of well formed
files.

This single point is a constant source of pain pain pain on Wikipedia
(because there are about 40 different coord formats supported by
various geocodding tags), ... just thinking about this problem makes
me feel ill.

I would highly recommend that the comments support a SINGLE format
(probably decimal degrees in WGS84 (with signed values), which is the
obvious singular format), and leave applications that want to support
more formats to link to parsing/projection libraries rather than
gunking up the files.