+1 for Pacific or Australia On 2013-04-19 18:34, Tobias Conradi wrote:
Some repition of former emails and one use case/practical implication.
Correctness: 1) Macquarie is outside the territory covered by The Antarctic Treaty 1959-12-01 http://www.ats.aq/documents/ats/treaty_original.pdf "The provisions of the present Treaty shall apply to the area south of 60° South Latitude"
2) Macquarie is the only location to have the Area Antarctic and be not south of 60° South Latitude
Fix: 3) The distance from Macquarie to Australian mainland (~2000 km) is larger than from Madagascar to Africa. Madagascar is placed in the surrounding ocean under Indian/ , so Macquarie can be placed in the surrounding ocean.
4) TZ identifiers have been changed if localities have been renamed. That is, the identifiers have been adapted to new real world situation. Here, the adaption would be a correction in the data, as is the change for Macquarie from ISO country AQ to AU. It has been wrong from the beginning. If one wants to freeze the identifiers, then please not for actual errors, especially not before a freeze is officially announced and data be checked.
The location part of the tzid is not necessarily matching anything in the real world, since there is the 14 character limit and some limits in the choice of characters. But the area part normally matches the real world name of the area.
Problem: 5) I just opened tz_world_mp in QGis and when opening the Attribute Table and sorting by TZID Macquarie is listed out of place. This will happen in any environment that does sorting by TZID.
Here it is special, since geographic Antarctica is not included in tz_world_mp leading to only one TZID under Antarctica/....
In map projections Antarctica often gets a special treatment. It may also be excluded as in * tz_world_mp (no time zones for Antarctica) * http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm
In programming a simple string matching on the IDs could remove time zones located in geographic Antarctica, if Macquarie would be moved out of Antarctica/....
So this has an effect on programming work.
Summary: Fixing it now will avoid many discussions or annoyances caused by Macquarie being placed in an, as far as general definitions of Antarctica are concerned wrong area. It will help programmers and other people that work with the data. This is a very special case of tzid change.
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