From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Point or an area on Earth's surface or elsewhere
In geography,
location
or
place
are used to denote a
region
(point, line, or area) on
Earth's surface
. 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. A
populated
place is called a
settlement
.
Types
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Locality
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A
locality
,
settlement
, or populated place is likely to have a well-defined name but a boundary that is not well defined 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. In geography, location is considered to be more precise than "place".
Relative location
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A relative location, or situation, is described as a displacement from another site. An example is "3 miles northwest of
Seattle
".
Absolute location
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An absolute location can be 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 example, the position of
New York City
in the United States can be expressed using the coordinate system as the location 40.7128°N (latitude), 74.0060°W (
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.
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See also
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References
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External links
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Contact delete