[tz] Geolocation extension to tzdist

[Jonathan Lennox]

On Thursday, September 29 2016, "Ken Murchison" wrote to "tz at iana.org" saying:

> All,
> 
> (sending to tz at iana.org since tzdist at ietf.org appears to be dead)
> 
> I was bored today (actually avoiding "real" work) and was playing around with
> the ESRI shapefile for timezones
> 
> I hacked up a quick extension to my tzdist implementation using the tz_world
> shapefile and basic ray tracing to be able to query a time zone by geo
> coordinates, similar to what Google offers in their Time Zone API.  Note that I
> have yet to spend any time writing code to account for "holes" in time zones
> like the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.

I'd suggest that people do want to standardize this, something based on LoST
(RFC 5222) would probably be a good starting point for time zone
geolocation.  That's a protocol that's designed for all the complexity of
how locations can be represented.

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu