It might be that François wasn't talking about geographic centre of countries, but established (read: old) reference points from times where each country / region had their own coordinate system, or not even real coordinate system, just measuring road distance from that defined point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilometre_Zero enjoy, Štefan On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Mike Collinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 05:00 AM 15/05/2008, Francois De Ryckel wrote: >>Hello everyone, >> >>How would you tag the "zero point" of a country? >> >>Shouldn't be an important tag as distances in a country are measure from >>that point? >> >>Thanks for the advices. >> >> >>François de Ryckel > > François, > > I don't know if this will suit your particular requirements, but I've > published a list of "country bounds" here which includes a centre lat/lon: > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User:Ewmjc/Country_bounds > > This was generated from US government (public domain!) GNIS data. This is a > dataset of several million location points around the world conveniently > categorised by country. I simply calculated a bounding box for each country > and then the centre point of that box. > > I then generated about 80% of the OSM place=country tags using the centre > point to locate the tag. The OSM database should now have a tag for every > country in the world (at least as defined by the US government). > > There are some inaccuracies though and I am working on a version two. In > particular, I included marine features which makes several boxes too large, > and may throw the centre point to a strange location. Once I have this > sorted, I intend to add a lat_max ... lon_min or some such tags to the > country tags. You could then derive a "zero point" directly from the OSM > database. > > Mike > > > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
