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dot GPS
Where am I? Here, at "here.gps" | |
I've been trying to think of a way to express high resolution GPS coordinates as a compressed number, perhaps something hexadecimal like AF8C650B (meaningless example) such that it would be a reasonable way to hand out coordinates with minimal error/characters, when it occurred to me that it might be
more efficient to use the internet's DNS approach.
I propose a new top-level domain of .gps, designed to work in conjunction with GPS devices (and/or Galileo) and the internet.
Hear a radio ad (friend, TV, whatever) and just punch the .gps in to have an instant set of coordinates without all the degrees minutes seconds hassle.
.gps > IP lookup > micro-site with coordinates. This would let us use the current internet without modification. Another cool function would be to link your portable device, live, to your site, and enable real-time updating of your coordinates - great for people wanting to track your location live (sports, kids, cars etc.).
As an alternative that may work even better, or at least in parallel, I propose a new category of metadata built into the next version of HTML. Invisible to a regular browser (not displayed I should say), the site would contain a set of coordinates that could be read by any program/device designed to access it. This would mean that all current websites would have the option of seamlessly encoding their preferred meatspace location in the header. Punch pluginhybrid.net into your PC and you get a forum about next gen cars - punch pluginhybrid.net into your nav system and it spits out a location.
This website may also encode a human-readable (but hidden unless desired) meatspace address, such that the domain name, like cnn.com for example would be all you'd need to write on an envelope to get it mailed to CNN. You could specify your return address the same way.
Location formats/microformats
http://microformats...ki/location-formats
[jutta, Jun 08 2008]
Wikipedia: DNS LOC records
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOC_record
Those who do not know their RFCs are doomed to repeat them. [jutta, Jun 08 2008]
A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)
http://xml.coverpag...priv-geo-uri-00.txt
Alexander Mayrhofer and Christian Spanring (eds). IETF Internet Draft [Ian Tindale, Jun 08 2008]
Yahoo! GeoPlanet API
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
Look for WOEID or WOE in the documentation. [krelnik, Jun 09 2008]
[link]
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Location microformats (machine-readable information embedded in webpages) are a good idea; see link for a couple of approaches under discussion. |
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(-) But expressing any sort of local application functionality with top-level domains is a really bad idea - DNS is a hierarchical architecture, and by splitting at the top rather than the bottom, you'd be making everybody coordinate entries in two separate namespaces. I think what you want is more like a LOC record - given some random DNS name, you can find out where that server is geographically. |
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Sorry - a little over my head, and perhaps I'm using the incorrect acronyms. |
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I intended to keep the DNS system the way it is now, with the TLD merely indicating that the domain name is related to global coordinates, not actually changing any protocols that the internet uses. Any real-time updates etc. would be done at the website itself, and would not interfere with the DNS. It would be expected that sites with .gps extensions use an index template that is standard, with the site designer merely entering coordinates. A browser might show this index file as just a set of numbers. I hope that explains Part I a little better... An example would be whiterock.gps. When entered into a GPS device (with net access), a set of coordinates is returned indicating the location of "whiterock". |
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I still like part II of the idea more - putting coordinates in websites for the location of a business etc. (not the server of the website). |
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I'd like to be able to type cnn.com into my handheld GPS unit (or GPS equipped phone - in nav mode) and have it merely pluck the GPS coordinates from the website, without actually bringing up the site browser-style. |
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Yahoo has a new geo-location API that uses something called a "Where On Earth ID" (or WOEID). Its not designed to locate particular spot, but rather for regions like towns, counties, provinces, states, countries, etc. But they are short and easily compared, and the API provides various ways to manipulate them. See link. |
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