Last modified: 2014-02-20 11:13:18 UTC
The geocoordinate datatype expects cardinal directions to be entered as N,E,S,W and so on and does not take other languages into account.
Here are some for starters. taken from the various language variants of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_direction : English: N North S South E East W West French: N Nord S Sud E Est O Ouese German: N Norden S Süden O Osten W Westen Italian: N Nord S Sud E Est O Ovest Spanish: N Norte S Sur E Este O Oeste Dutch: N Noord Z Zuid O Oost W West
Notice that this reveals a potential source of problems on input. Internationalization of the initials of the cardinal points, without knowledge of the locale the input is coming from, can make input ambiguous and locale-dependent: if we receive a coordinate of the form "33 N 22 O", does that mean the Italian "33 Nord 22 Ovest" = 33 N 22 W, or, in Dutch, "33 Noord 22 Oost" = 33 N 22 E ?
Here is a listing of the names of the cardinal points in some other languages: http://www.compassmuseum.com/diverstext/cardinals.htm Note the use of "Severní" for "North" in Czech, and "észak" for North in Hungarian. Given that large number of alternatives, and the use of the same initials for quite different cardinal points in different languages, it's hard to see how internationalized input could work in the general case, without a specific locale identifier being supplied with each string.
We should also allow for the coordinate reference system to be specified in all cases. WGS84 has become almost universal for informal geocoordinates, thanks to GPS, and Wikipedia's mapping tools all assume WGS84 is used, so it's probably reasonable to assume that as a default, but there's lots of high-resolution geodata out there with different coordinate reference systems, for which discarding the CRS will result in significant errors.
