Andy, you're missing the point.
A bare lat-long pair is not always helpful.
If that's all you have, you can't really display a useful map. The
existing mapping tools tend to use product-specific ways of specifying
the degree of zoom needed, to distinguish between the right side of my
desk, the Technorati offices, South of Market, San Francisco, The Bay
Area, California, and America.
A radius of interest is a way to express this in a platform-neutral way
that doesn't require address-parsing. It is readily derivable from any
specific mapping platform.
If you want to express a geographic feature such as those I mentioned
above, clearly a human-readable label such as 'San Francisco' is a
better than a polygon. You probably realise that the polygons necessary
are in fact fractals, with the resolution necessary determined by the
zoom level too.
We don't want to replicate Arc-Info here, we want to replicate useful
user-info.
On Oct 2, 2006, at 2:58 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Colin
Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
Or the capacity to describe a polygon...
I call the 80/20 rule into effect here.
Fine, I'm confident that more than 80% of countries, counties, towns,
cities, gardens, parks, nature reserves, and industrial estates are
polygons, and fewer than 20% are circles.
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