The World Geographic Reference System

Jordan T. Hastings

Go2 Systems, Inc.
Irvine, California

Email: jordan@geog.ucsb.edu


Go2 Systems, a California company, has developed a new coordinate system for digitial geospatial data, particularly suitable to emergent wireless Internet and Web-mapping applications. The patented Go2 system, termed the World Geographic Reference System (WGRS), strikes a balance between precise numerical notations, such as latitude/longitude or Universal Transverse Mercator, and colloquial names, which are inherently approximate. The numbers accommodate machine computations, whereas the names facilitate human references. WGRS is based on a irregular gridwork of oblique stereographic projections, centered on important physical and/or cultural geographic features, especially cities. These grids may overlap, and also may have activated sub-grids nested to arbitrary depth. Within the WGRS grids, named places are catalogued, and can be referenced, at a variety of scales from fully-extended 100Km x 100Km regions, down to 1Km x 1Km neighborhoods, and even smaller features, eg. mouths of springs, public monuments, MacDonalds (tm) restaurants. In effect, WGRS provides a multi-scale, areally-explicit gazetteer, organized in consonnance with significant features on the landscape. Syntactically, WGRS coordinates appear as a compact string of "dotted digit pairs" that interleave Northing/Easting measurements in a single object relative to a named grid, eg. "US.CA.LA.45.36.72.81". This notation, which is conveniently reminiscent of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), is modestly mnemonic, quickly entered using a variety of input devices (keyboards, phone keypads, voice recognition systems), and also reliably communicated across the Web. WGRS applications currently being developed by Go2 Systems and partners include U.S. 9-1-1 emergency systems, and an international "yellow-pages" directory for both the wired- and wireless-Internet. Additional information is available at http://www.go2online.com