Details
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Improvement
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Status: Open
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Minor
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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None
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Description
The GeoHashCoder implementation is currently restricted to the two-dimensional geographic coordinates case, which is what geohashes are used in web site like http://geohash.org/. However the algorithm would be easy to generalize to the n-dimensional case. The main difficulty would be to decide what to do about the range of values.
The problem
Geohashes are very sensitive to the range of allowed values. For example the de facto geohash standard uses longitude in the -180° to +180° range and latitude in the -90° to 90° range. Any change of those ranges would produce totally different geohash codes, making them unusable to any site/software that are not aware of the new ranges.
The range of allowed values is easy to determine for longitudes and latitudes. But it is much more difficult to fix a "standard" range of elevation or time values. There is a risk that different peoples would use different ranges, thus leading to lot of incompatible geohashes.
This JIRA task is for collecting use cases in order to determine if something like "de facto standard" ranges emerge at least for some domains. We may also consider using some symbols normally not used in geohashes for declaring which ranges are used.