Geotude

Currently, we could say we are all familiar with the concept of latitude and longitude as means to idenfity location at needle-pin precision.

Similarly, a Geotude is also used to reference location. However, instead of identifying one "intersection" (between the latitude/longitude of course), a Geotude uses the "area" bounded by integer degrees of latitude/longitude to identify a location anywhere on and off Earth.

While we "count" latitude/longitude by the degrees, a Geotude is identified with a more intuitive string that looks like this: 53781.06.76.40 (incidentally, this is the Geotude to our office :))

Geotudes are sequentially numbered from left to right (West to East), and top to bottom (North to South).

The smallest numbered Geotude starts at latitude=0°, longitude=-180°.

Since we've already established that a Geotude is bounded integer degrees of latitude and longitude, the total of Geotudes in the world come up to 64, 800. Pretty nifty, eh?

Let's assume that a (level 0) Geotude is "square" (in reality, because a Geotude is equal-angled, as in latitude/longitude angle; they differ in dimension depending on their relative location to the equator) like so:

We can sub-divide a level 0 Geotude into 100 sub-Geotudes; numbered from 00 to 99:

So, each sub-Geotudes can be referenced by 12345.xx.

If we in turn, look at Geotude 12345.xx, we can again sub-divide this sub-Geotude into another 100 sub-Geotudes; numbered from 00 to 99 again: and we get 12345.xx.yy.

And this goes on and on infinitely!

You didn't think we'd actually completely abandoned the very foundation of location tracking, did you?

If you've been wondering, yes, latitude/longitude can be converted to Geotude and vice versa! Here is a simple Javascript implementation of the converter.

It is important note that since Geotude is an area, whereas latitude/longtidue is a point; we cannot "really" convert an area to a point or vice versa. What we can do, is established that all Geotude are referenced by the top-left (North-West) point. Hence, the formula for converting latitude/longitude to Geotude is:

Geotude is a solution looking for a problem :)

Does Geotude solve your problem? You think Geotude can be better? Please join the community in shaping the future of Geotude.

You can join the mailing list. Or contact the geodudes at georger_[at]_geotude.com (Richard George) and kegan_[at]_geotude.com (Kegan Gan).