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location is a key aspect of checkin & event posts, and also sometimes an aspect of posts in general, like where a note or photo/video was posted. The aspect of location is sometimes referred to as geo for short.

If you are looking for the microformats2 property, see:

h-event’s location property

IndieWeb Examples

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith on adactio.com since 2014-05-27 with a naked h-geo inside the note h-entry.

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby Walters using Taproot on waterpigs.co.uk since 2012-09-22

Jonny Barnes

Jonny Barnes does two things. If the post simply has co-ordinates, these are included in data tags, and a text representation derived from OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service is displayed. The first example of this is from 2014-01-08. This is marked up with h-adr microformats. If there is an existing venue, then this is added to the note with a map and marked up with h-card microformats. The first time this was done was 2016-10-05. See https://jonnybarnes.uk/notes/CB and https://jonnybarnes.uk/notes/Bs

IndieWeb software

A WordPress post with a location.
Wordpress' simple location plugin displays location and associated weather data for posts, as well as a static map.
Known supports checkins and displays a map.
Twyne posts can have coordinates and be displayed on a map.

Silo Examples

Instagram displays the location below the title on detail pages and links it to a location page on the platform.

When you mention "place" in a post, Facebook will prompt you to add a location to the post.

Enabling Technologies

Markup / microformats
- h-geo for lat/long locations
- h-adr for structured address locations
- h-card for named venues
Data exchange
- GeoJSON
Location Services
- ~~Geoloqi~~ (now offline)
- OSM Nominatim
Venues database
- OpenStreetMap API and data access
- Geonames Web Services
  - findNearbyPlaceName used by StatusNet
Open Source
- Atlas - APIs for looking up timezone information, geocoding, weather information, and generating static maps

Location Tracking Apps

Overland - iOS
OwnTracks - Android version
Zanzito - Another Android app, deprecated
PhoneTrack
GPSLogger - Android
see also Category:location for further options

Tracking Transportation Location

For various reasons, tracking your location on transportation...most notably planes due difficulty in getting a wifi signal, is difficult.

Aaron Parecki's iOS Overland app does allow alternative input from wifi on planes, to record the location data for tracking purposes. He has also extracted this information subsequently from flight tracking services and loaded it into his location database.
David Shanske tracks flight location on equipped planes on Android phones using Tasker scripts written for each provider.

How

How to determine the location of a microformat

To accommodate various different location use-cases, there are multiple places within a microformat structure where location data can be placed. Given a microformat, to determine it’s location:

create a stack of property maps where location data might be found, in order of priority
for each potential location property, search the stack for a valid property value

In more detail (pseudocode):

given a microformat structure mf, to find the location it represents:
let location-sources be a list of microformats, containing the following, in this order:
- mf
- if mf has a location property which is a microformat, that value
  - 2017-06-06 addition: if that value has an adr property, that value
- if mf has an adr property which is a microformat, that value
- if mf has a geo property:
  - if the geo property is a microformat, that value
  - else if the geo property is a string, parse it as a geo: URL and append a derived microformat containing the properties of the geo: URL: latitude+longitude if they’re both present, and altitude if it was present
for each of the following location properties, search the property map stack in order of priority for a valid value. As soon as one is found, consider that the value. If none are found, the microformat does not have this property
- street-address
- extended-address
- post-office-box
- locality
- region
- postal-code
- country-name
- label
- latitude
- longitude
- altitude

issues

2017-06-06 Sven Knebel added an extra step to deal with the case that a location property is an h-card which itself has an adr property

implementations

mf2util – [1] (used by granary, bridgy)

Motion

Location information may also contain indication about motion, e.g. a person at a location, but in motion, by some method. Such information in practice includes things like:

velocity (perhaps with a specific motion vector in 2 or 3 dimensions)
mode of motion / transport (e.g. walking, running, bicycling, driving, stationary)

Brainstorming

Location in Notes discusses some of the issues in adding a location to a note.

The two most common visual elements in presenting location are a textual description of the location and/or a map.

Textual Description

There is an issue of specificity. With all of the details possible in a address, relevancy can be reduced if you add in all the possible details.

For example, to use the site of IWC Cambridge...

The Ray and Maria Stata Center, 32 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vassar Street, MIT, Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA, 02139-4309

The most common textual description is merely the locality, region, and country....Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The country is often omitted if it is the same as the individual's usual country.

From a Microformats point of view, once a location has a name(The Ray and Maria Stata Center, for example), it goes from an address to a venue(and a h-adr to a h-card).

The utility of displaying coordinates is debatable. While having them available can be useful...for example, to allow location to be identified on a map, they do not, by themselves, enhance human conception of a where a person is.

Issues

Beware of IP Mapping

If you use "IP Mapping" to autogenerate or autosuggest a location for your posts, beware that may give you really bad artificial precision, thus implying you were somewhere you were not, e.g as illustrated by this article:

2016-04-10 How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell
- 2016-04-12 Update: This is the new digital center of the United States