More lessons of standardization

You can make a spec short and sweet, but there is no guarantee that it will be implemented correctly. Did my woofing about agile standardization anger the format gods, or is GeoJSON really the dribble cup of the "GeoWeb" after all? Check out this excerpt from the timeline of Bill Dollins, who writes from the countryside near Washington, D.C.:

{ ...,
  "id":5993294422,
  "geo":{"type":"Point","coordinates":[38.50745,-76.76051]},
  }

For all the bloggage, not a single geo pundit has noticed that there's a problem. Do you?

Update (2009-11-25): Chris Schmidt summarizes the GeoJSON coordinate order debate.

Update (2009-11-26): To be fixed in the next version of the Twitter API (via Andrew Larcombe and Bill Dollins).

Comments

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: daryl

it has y x and not x y ?

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: Christopher Schmidt

Either that, or he's mapping Antarctica.

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: Brandon

No spatial reference? I know we can assume it, but it isn't explicitly stated.

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: STH

Projection and Datum?

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: cwhelm

"geo" should also be "geometry"

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: cwhelm

and "id" belongs in the properties

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: Sean

Coordinate order is the only problem. I don't think developers necessarily have to buy in to features and feature collections from the standard GIS model, but we all have to agree on coordinates.

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: Paul Ramsey

Somewhere, Dale Lutz's head is exploding. Let your X be your X, your Y be your Y, anything else is the work of the Evil One.

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: STH

Well, what is correct? X,Y or Y,X - in Norway we have the official Y X instead of the "international / US / UK" X Y.

Should all countries also ride the car on the right side of the road and not the left side?

Re: More lessons of standardization

Author: Sean

If all of our national roads were mapped into the same transit space, intertwined, without any borders or gates -- so that US-40 (for example) connected to France's A9 (the Languedocien), and also connected to almost any other major road in the world -- you'd certainly want to prevent systemic and massive accidents by forming a global consensus on traffic direction. This is the situation on the World Wide Web. Whether GeoJSON coordinates should be [easting, northing] or [northing, easting] (or [westing, southing]) is, to some degree, arbitrary. The benefits of agreement are not arbitrary. Global consensus allows global interoperability.