To locate by Latitudes and Longitudes (many locations)?

[cordin 0]

Hello to you.


I have dozens of pairs of Latitudes and Longitudes on hand, such as 55°02.857'N + 002°3.294'E, and I need to find out where they are. Each pair of them means a location, could be in a city, desert, forest, ocean etc.

In what way I can find their rough locations? Just the country and area name will do, and no need to be precisely accurate.

There are online webpages can do so but the number of coordinates are huge so I can’t do them one by one manually. Would there be a list of coordinates that I can search for results?

Thanks.

[Tim the plumber 56]

Google earth works.

 

Or you could use an atlas like your supposed to.

Edited June 12, 2014 by Tim the plumber

[swansont 7433]

As Tim implied, the closest thing to a "list" would probably be an atlas or a globe. A list (lookup table) of every possible coordinate might exist, but if the resolution is at the same level as your coordinates, it would be huge, and I doubt consulting it would save any time over entering the coordinates in Google maps/earth.

[cordin 0]

thanks for the replies.

 

because the Latitudes and Longitudes are in an Excel file with other relevant data, so preferabbly i want to set up the lookup function between. I am think to round them to simplify and resutls matched, for example 55°02.857'N + 002°3.294'E to 55.0 + 2.1. Would this be a reasonable way?

[barfbag 72]

Tim the plumber already told you Google Earth works great. I have no idea what you mean by rounding and simplifying results. Locations are fairly exact.

 

The planet has a grid on it of our design. North and south positions and East/West positions. Any globe/Atlas/ or map with these lines should also work

Edited June 13, 2014 by barfbag

[Sensei 1033]

Tim the plumber already told you Google Earth works great. I have no idea what you mean by rounding and simplifying results. Locations are fairly exact.

 

The planet has a grid on it of our design. North and south positions and East/West positions. Any globe/Atlas/ or map with these lines should also work

 

He wants to automate this process..

 

There are online webpages can do so but the number of coordinates are huge so I can’t do them one by one manually.

 

How these websites are receiving data?

If they're send in URL (like index.php?long=123&lat=45), it should be possible to write script and run it.

Do you know how to write script or program C/C++?

 

I have spend whole day writing such script that downloaded data for me for >3000 entries of data

[barfbag 72]

@ Sensai,

 

If he wants a programmed solution he should give a better outline of his background and possibly relocate this question to Computer Science as there is no simple programming solution.

 

It sounds like he has the data, but just needs it translated into locations.

 

If he wants to do it with programming then PHP solutions might help.

 

http://www.web-max.ca/PHP/article_1.php

 

PHP is very easy and is only a step away from HTML which many know the basics of.

 

I think the code in that link should help. You could Copy/Paste your coordinates to an array and then have your program draw a square around the location or pop up a local map instead of inputting manually to a field. It would be harder to have your program output the actual name of location, but if it is circled on a map or a local map pops up you could look at answers, or add a photo/flag at those locations..

Edited June 13, 2014 by barfbag

[Tim the plumber 56]

I've no idea if this is at all possible or useful for the application but...

 

Is there a way of automating the process of looking for the nearest land mark after the position is found and would you want a fuller address or "Middle of the Pacific Ocean" type answers?

[cordin 0]

Dear all,

 

 

 

Thanks for the helps.

 

Certainly it will be perfect if I can do it from programming. But if I only know some Excel skills and what’s all, and I want an immediate solution?

 

Below worked out may help, and of course it’s an rough answer only, before I learned how to do it from programming.

 

(Let me know if you need the Excel files.)

 

 

[barfbag 72]

Simple works. Nice solution.

[billiards 30]

I wrote some FORTRAN code (ugh!) a while back to figure out what tectonic plate any given (lat,lon) point is on. This could be extended to any arbitrary region (continent, country, city, national park, lake, whatever) provided a database with polygons defining the regions.

 

If you have a database of polygons defining regions then the solution to find out whether you are inside the region or not is quite elegant. Imagine shooting a ray in any direction from the point of interest, if the ray crosses the polygon boundary an odd number of times then you are inside the polygon, if it crosses an even number of times then you are outside the region. This works for an arbitrarily complex polygon.

[Klaynos 739]

In R you can use the rdstk package which uses the data science tool kit.