Location

In geography, location and place are used to denote a point or an area on the Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term location generally implies a higher degree of certainty than place, the latter often indicating an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human or social attributes of place identity and sense of place than on geometry.

Types of location and places

Locality

A locality, settlement, or populated place is likely to have a well-defined name but a boundary which is not well defined in varies by context. London, for instance, has a legal boundary, but this is unlikely to completely match with general usage. An area within a town, such as Covent Garden in London, also almost always has some ambiguity as to its extent.

Relative location

A relative location, or situation, is described as a displacement from another site. An example is "3 miles northwest of Seattle".

Absolute location

An absolute location is designated using a specific pairing of latitude and longitude in a Cartesian coordinate grid — for example, a Spherical coordinate system or an ellipsoid-based system such as the World Geodetic System — or similar methods. For instance, the position of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela can be expressed using the coordinate system as the location 9.80°N (latitude), 71.56°W (longitude). It is, however, just one way. There are several alternative ways.

Absolute locations are also relative locations, since even absolute locations are expressed relative to something else. For example, longitude is the number of degrees east or west of the Prime Meridian, a line arbitrarily chosen to pass through Greenwich, England. Similarly, latitude is the number of degrees north or south of the Equator. Because latitude and longitude are expressed relative to these lines, a position expressed in latitude and longitude is also a relative location.[1]

gollark: That is an oddly specific scenario. And you can just check the online version *now*.

gollark: I check Wikipedia rather than using the (surprisingly small) database dump, partly because the database dump is text-only and the software for viewing it is lacking, and partly because there's just no particular reason to not use the online one.

gollark: Can you *not* just browse it online as normal people do?

gollark: Not really sure how to express that without (*EVIL*) dynamically generating SQL, or filtering the rows in JS after they're retrieved...

gollark: I've *just* realized that I think the behavior I want is probably requiring *all* the flags in the query to be present, not *one* of them, so this query is mostly useless, if cool.

References

Gersmehl, Philip (2008). Teaching Geography (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. pp. 60. ISBN 978-1-59385-715-8.

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[1] Gersmehl, Philip (2008). Teaching Geography (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. pp. 60. ISBN 978-1-59385-715-8.