Riley S. Faelan on Nostr: They seem to be in degrees. Consider that a nautical mile, which is about 1.8 ...
They seem to be in degrees. Consider that a nautical mile, which is about 1.8 kilometres, is by definition one sixtieth of a latitude degree difference. So, a numeric value of two digits after the decimal point in your table corresponds, near the equator, to about one kilometre in nature. Longitude differences further away correspond to even shorter distance than that in nature.
=> Four digits after the decimal would specify a geographic location at roughly 10m * 10m. That's not enough for a place named York, that's enough for virtually all but the tinniest of houses. If you have but one set of coordinates per settlement, three digits after decimal would be more than enough precision for pretty much every single meaningful human settlement there is, or there can be. It can only make sense to go further than that if you care about, something like the shape of the settlement.
But your coordinates are stored at a precision of about seven digits after the decimal point. Specifying the location of a settlement in centimetres is absolutely noise. Not only are all human settlements much larger than a centimetre, they also move around, often by multiple centimetres per year, because of geological activities of the Earth.
=> Four digits after the decimal would specify a geographic location at roughly 10m * 10m. That's not enough for a place named York, that's enough for virtually all but the tinniest of houses. If you have but one set of coordinates per settlement, three digits after decimal would be more than enough precision for pretty much every single meaningful human settlement there is, or there can be. It can only make sense to go further than that if you care about, something like the shape of the settlement.
But your coordinates are stored at a precision of about seven digits after the decimal point. Specifying the location of a settlement in centimetres is absolutely noise. Not only are all human settlements much larger than a centimetre, they also move around, often by multiple centimetres per year, because of geological activities of the Earth.