Localization Facilitation

Chuck Soper chucks at lmi.net
Fri Sep 10 19:17:53 UTC 2004


At 1:33 PM -0700 9/9/04, Paul Eggert wrote:
>Chuck Soper <chucks at lmi.net> writes:
>
>>  I suggest that two new columns be added to zone.tab, location (city)
>>  and sub-division (state/province). The sub-division would be for the
>>  city not the entire time zone region. For example, Illinois for
>>  America/Chicago.
>
>But America/Chicago identifies a fairly large chunk of the United
>States, including Iowa, Missouri, most of (but not all of) Kansas,
>etc.
>
>The main idea behind the "America/Chicago" and the current
>latitude/longitude is to identify a single point in the region, a
>point that will continue to be identified if the region splits (an
>event that occurs from time to time).  The latitude/longitude is a
>quite-inadequate substitute for what is really needed (namely, the
>entire region boundary), but it's the best we've got right now.  I
>worry that adding a column with data like "Illinois" would be a step
>in the wrong direction, and would cause more confusion than it would
>cure, since "Illinois" is an attribute of Chicago, and is not a direct
>attribute of the America/Chicago TZID.

I tend to think that:
  - a populous geographic point within a time zone region, and
  - a description of the entire time zone region
are both useful.

When I want to know what time what is in Sydney, the display name 
"Sydney, Australia" is more understandable to me than "Eastern 
Standard Time" or "Eastern Summer Time". Yet, if I lived in Australia 
then Eastern Time would be more understandable.

I live near San Francisco, California. If someone talks about the 
time zone for Los Angeles it sounds strange, but if they say, 
"Pacific Time", then it makes sense.

I believe that the understandability of a time zone display name (Los 
Angeles or Pacific Time) is dependent on where you are from.

Even if the time zone boundaries were available there would still be 
a need for a display name such as "Chicago", "Chicago, Illinois", 
"Central Daylight Time", or "Chicago - Central Time".

I don't think that adding a column with data like "Illinois" wouldn't 
cause more confusion, it would just maintain the save level of 
confusion. :-)

On the other hand, adding a couple columns to zone.tab would probably 
not provide any immediate benefit to anyone. And it is work that 
would take time.

Thanks for listening to my feedback.

>What we really need are the region boundaries (ideally hooked up to
>GPS :-), or some data that will let us derive the region boundaries
>from other databases.  The current "comments" column is an informal
>attempt in that direction, and I'd rather focus our efforts there.

I like the idea of heading in the direction of having the actual 
region boundaries. About a year ago, using ESRI software, I 
thoroughly looked manifold.net's World Time Zones Map. At that time 
it was a little out of date. It looked like it would be difficult to 
maintain. I'm glad that Manifold made it available.

The current "comments" column contains various data. I think it would 
help if this was a little more formal. A "region" column with a 
specific format might be an answer, yet I think there would probably 
be a lot of issues (standardization of codes such as ISO or FIPS, 
etc.).

Perhaps, the Open Geospatial Consortium would be interested in 
helping add region boundaries to the tz database?
http://www.opengeospatial.org/about/?page=vision
They clearly state: "Our core mission is to deliver spatial interface 
specifications that are openly available for global use."

Chuck



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