Re: Forward/backward compatibility

There are lots of cases where converting a civic address to a 
lat/long/altitude results in silly results.  I'm sure Martin has better 
examples, but here are a few that come to mind:

The most obvious one is where the civic address describes a large area, 
like a state or a county.  You can run into this even when the address 
represents a specific unit of land, like a large farm.  Or a large 
building, like the Merchandise Mart or the Pentagon.  (Factoid: The 
Pentagon takes up 0.004 of a degree of latitude.  Merchandise Mart. 
Both have their own ZIP codes.)

My favorite example is tall buildings, where a lat/long/alt gets you to 
the door and tells you how many meters to go up, but not to which floor.

--Richard



Doug Turner wrote:
> HI Martin,
> 
> Why can't fixed devices convert their civic address to lat/lon?
> 
> Regards,
> Doug
> 
> 
> On Nov 13, 2008, at 2:08 PM, Thomson, Martin wrote:
> 
>> I am of the opinion that the current approach is likely to have the 
>> opposite effect to what is intended - that is, it will reinforce the 
>> fragmentation of the "mobile" and "fixed" webs simply because mobile 
>> devices will have geodetic, fixed devices will not.
>