On Thursday, September 29 2016, "Ken Murchison" wrote to "tz@iana.org" saying:
All,
(sending to tz@iana.org since tzdist@ietf.org appears to be dead)
I was bored today (actually avoiding "real" work) and was playing around with the ESRI shapefile for timezones
I hacked up a quick extension to my tzdist implementation using the tz_world shapefile and basic ray tracing to be able to query a time zone by geo coordinates, similar to what Google offers in their Time Zone API. Note that I have yet to spend any time writing code to account for "holes" in time zones like the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.
I'd suggest that people do want to standardize this, something based on LoST (RFC 5222) would probably be a good starting point for time zone geolocation. That's a protocol that's designed for all the complexity of how locations can be represented. -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu