How to do things on the World Wide Web

Author: Marghanita da Cruz

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How to Geo Tag Webpages and Photographs

Geo Tagging was a popular topic at Public Sphere #2 Camp in June 2009.

At the time of writing, there are a number of ways of including geographical location information in an HTML document.

The core geographical information is position as decimal longitude and latitude, country, region and placename.

For example Annandale, NSW, Australia at Latitude:33°52'53.04"S, Longitude:151°10'14.52"E can be encoded as:

  • Metadata in the header of the document.

    ⟨ META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="-33.8814;151.1706"⟩
    ⟨ META NAME="geo.country" CONTENT="au"⟩
    ⟨ META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="au-ns"⟩
    ⟨ META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Annandale"⟩

  • Geo Microformat in the body of the document:

    ⟨div class='geo'⟩
    ⟨span class='latitude'⟩-33.8814⟨/span⟩
    ⟨span class='longitude'⟩151.1707⟨/span⟩
    ⟨/div⟩

  • and to go to the location on google maps in a browser enter:

    http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=annandale+nsw&sll=-33.877898,151.170673

    • Digital Cameras encode geographical information in the photograph see Wikipedia: EXIF

    Further Reading and References

    ramin.com.au/how-to-geo-tag.shtml Last modified 12 January 2010. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License ramin communications.