Geographic coordinates (obtaining)

Methods to obtain geographic coordinates of a place include:

• Category:Lists of coordinates
• Manually:
  • Looking at a printed map or atlas, either those you own or at a library
  • Using a GPS satellite navigator
• On the web:
  • Multimap provides geographic coordinates of a location selected from a map.
  • http://www.world-gazetteer.com provides geographic coordinates of many cities (select country - "cities" - city)
  • For US coordinates, USGS GNIS service is extremely extensive. It also provides linkouts to topozone and terraserver so that you can tweak the results to your liking.
  • Looking at a website built by GPS users, e.g. http://geourl.org/ or http://www.findu.com/ or http://www.geocaching.com/
  • Looking for GPS "Waypoint" files
  • Googleing for the city name together with "latitude", "longitude", which will give hits like http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001769.html
  • Looking at a wiki that uses map coordinates, e.g.http://susning.nu/
  • Zooming in on the place on TerraServer-USA and getting the values at left

Regardless of the source of coordinates, good practise is to evaluate whether they appear reasonable at first glance.

See also Geographic coordinate system

External links

• Census Gazetteer: to identify U.S. places with coordinates.
• Getty TGN coordinates of places all over the world.