On Nov 23, 2019, at 11:03 AM, Paul Gilmartin via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 2019-11-23, at 11:35:43, Guy Harris wrote:
User interfaces for selecting a time zone should not rely on the set of tzdb IDs being a comprehensive list of cities.
Is there an accessible gazetteer, imagemap, or latitude-longitude converter useful for this purpose?
See https://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#timezone although they are rate-limited. I think Ubuntu may do a bulk download of the database and use it for their own server, used for the Ubuntu time-zone-selection mechanism.
My phone does it on request for a built-in set of cities (e.g. Melbourne but not Alice Springs), but it won't display the zoneinfo path.
My phone uses the result it gets from Location Services and turns it into a tzdb ID internally. So does my Mac, and the way I display the zone info path is $ ls -ld /etc/localtime lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 45 Oct 4 03:47 /etc/localtime -> /var/db/timezone/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles (your mileage may vary on macOS Catalina if that's on a read-only file system). I don't know whether Apple have their own image maps. This project: https://github.com/evansiroky/timezone-boundary-builder is "A tool to extract data from Open Street Map (OSM) to build the boundaries of the world's timezones." I don't know what geonames.org uses - it may use somebody's shapefiles or it may rely on people associating tzdb IDs with locations.