It has been ages since the last time I blogged. Here it is "Those concepts in the geospatial field that have cost us millions of $$$":
https://erouault.blogspot.com/2024/09/those-concepts-in-geospatial-field-that.html
Those concepts in the geospatial field that have cost us millions of $$$

Every domain has its baggage of concepts, which at first sight don't appear to be that terrible, but which are in practice. Let's start with...

@EvenRouault I'm just here for the rant-mode Even...
@hobu Turn on the subtitles. The rant is never far away ;-)
@EvenRouault you're burning out recently. Please dont 😅 take some time for yourself
@EvenRouault "the only solution I see to solve the issue it is to ask all population to relocate on the line of longitude=latitude, and exclude any mapping outside of it." 🤣🤣🤣
@EvenRouault empty geometries are insane 🤬

@nyalld @EvenRouault And *typed* empties are doubly insane.

It's like distinguishing between 32 bit and 64 bit NaN.

@sgillies @nyalld I've always dreamt about being able to use the degrees of freedom left by all those possible bits in a NaN representation to actually store useful information in them. That's a bit like quantum physics with Vacuum energy or this old saying "[Redacted entity] created not-a-number, saw this was (not) good, and from it/them created numbers"
@EvenRouault @sgillies @nyalld R's NA for floating point numbers (distinct from NaN) actually does that; IEEE 754 however doesn't mandate its propagation (but current processors seem to do so); see for a longer discussion the NA section in https://blog.r-project.org/2020/11/02/will-r-work-on-apple-silicon/
Will R Work on Apple Silicon? - The R Blog

@EvenRouault i wonder how much fossil fuel is burned to store all those 15 decimal precision geojsons and other file formats that come like that as default...
@hareldan There's actually a GDAL RFC for that (https://gdal.org/en/latest/development/rfc/rfc99_geometry_coordinate_precision.html). It just needs to be used...
RFC 99: Geometry coordinate precision — GDAL documentation

@hareldan
re: "store all those 15 decimal precision geojsons" obXKCD: https://xkcd.com/2170/
@EvenRouault
Coordinate Precision

xkcd

@EvenRouault
This is the stuff nightmares are made off... geo "standards".

There's also R sf dataframes that allow geometries with different CRS yay! We really need geometry collections with multiple CRS, because that's what we usually use /s

@EvenRouault This is gold, thanks for sharing!
@EvenRouault Can we add GPKG's coordinate precision which allows to map the position of an atom to the rant list? https://github.com/opengeospatial/geopackage/issues/365
Support for TWKB or other compact geometry encoding · Issue #365 · opengeospatial/geopackage

The vector data in geopackage is today encoded as WKB, a well-defined and well known way of formatting spatial geometries. However, since all coordinates are encoded as two 64bit double values, the...

GitHub
@andrestumpf There are people actually requiring that level of precision, so we shouldn't exclude them. Well, maybe not at the angstrom level, but tens of millimeters is something geodesists routinely want to achieve. At least some I've interacted with... That said the main issue of TWKB or friends in GeoPackage is that would make it a non-interoperable extension...

@EvenRouault

"the only solution I see to solve the issue it is to ask all population to relocate on the line of longitude=latitude, and exclude any mapping outside of it."

Genius.

@jjimenezshaw The initial version of it was to relocate everybody at Null Island, but turns out to be impractical given that the buoy has disappeared, and due to the lack of clear datum there, only WGS84 coordinates could be realistically used, so we would need to communicate an epoch, and that would confuse people. Yes, Null Island (lambda, phi)=(0,0), but when exactly ?!?
@EvenRouault you can see that as a feature, not a bug.
The uncertainty of WGS84 in space... and time, could provide about 10 square metres at 0,0 That should be enough for 8 billion people. It would increase with time... to fit the new population.