[tei-council] place meeting?

[Syd Bauman]

I'm sorry I wasn't able to post this before the place meeting occured
earlier today. 

I never got the chance in Berlin to give my comments on the "Draft
proposals for representation of geographic information" document.
Most of the scribbles on my hard-copy are typos. But I went over it
again and found two substantive issues:

* In an example of <location>, the <distance> element is used. Per
  previous Council discussions, the <distance> element was removed. I
  am not sure if this document is recommending that it be brought
  back for this purpose or not. (Personally, I think <measure> will
  do for this usage.)

* There are 3 examples of using latitude and longitude to indicate a
  place's location (in #MYF, #IS, and #ESB), and they are all
  different! 
    <location scheme="LatLong">41.687142 -74.870109</location>
    <location type="lat-long">65 00 N, 18 00 W</location>
    <location type="latLong">
      <measure unit="latlong">40.7484&deg; N 73.9858&deg; W</measure>
    </location>
  Use of latitude and longitude to locate a place is going to be
  *extremely* common, and, IMHO, fits squarely into that category of
  things where it is more important that we all do it the same than
  that we have the capability to do it however we want. I.e., the TEI
  Guidelines should recommend one and only one method for encoding
  these. 

  Note, BTW, that <measure> is, as currently defined, not a
  particularly good way to encode a latitude or longitude (nor a
  latitude and longitude). This is because latitude and longitude
  traditionally include a direction, for which <measure> does not
  provide a place for normalization. However, it may be quite
  reasonable to simply decide to use the common system of using
  negative values for S and W:

   <measure unit="degrees" quantity="40.7484" commodity="lat">40&deg;44'54.21" N</measure>
   <measure unit="degrees" quantity="-70.9850" commodity="long">70&deg;59'06" W</measure>

   <measure unit="degrees" quantity="-28.0061" commodity="lat">28&deg;00'22" S</measure>
   <measure unit="degrees" quantity="153.4294" commodity="long">153&deg;25'46" E</measure>

  Using negative values for S and W is what's done in digital mapping
  applications, or so I've read. I think I like this the best. (That
  second example is the location of Queensland Number One: "At 323 m
  [it] is the world's tallest all-residential building, when measured
  to the top of its spire.".)

  The advantage of using <measure>, is that the normalized decimal
  degrees using negatives for S and W can be stored in the attribute
  values, and users can do whatever they want for the content.

  BTW, decimal degrees should be used as the value of quantity=, not
  degrees, minutes, seconds. (Obviously, because the unit= is
  "degrees", not "DMS" -- but ISO 31 recommends that the degree be
  subdivided decimally rather than using the minute and second.)