Week 5: GIS and Spatial Data Mining
Coordinate Systems and Projections
Problem Statement
● Coordinate systems are mathematical descriptions of the earth that
allow us to communicate about locations precisely.
● Earth does not respect the rules that were shown in the Euclidean
example because Earth is an ellipsoid: a ball form that is not perfectly
round.
● This makes map and coordinate system calculations much more
complex than what high-school mathematics teaches us about
coordinates.
● Airplane flights are a great example to illustrate the problem as they
generally cover long distances.
● Taking into account the curvature of the earth really doesn’t matter
much when measuring the size of your terrace, but it does make a big
impact when moving across continents.
● The more you move to the north, the shorter the latitude lines
actually are.
● Latitude lines go around the earth, so at the North Pole you have a
length of zero, and at the equator, the middle line is the longest
possible. The closer to the poles, the shorter the distance to go
around the earth.
● When making maps, we cannot plot in three dimensions, and we,
therefore, need to find some way or another to put a
three-dimensional path onto a two-dimensional image.
Coordinate Systems
There are three types of coordinate systems:
● Geographic Coordinate Systems
● Projected Coordinate Systems
● Local Coordinate Systems
● Geographic Coordinate Systems
○ They respect the fact that the world is an ellipsoid, and they,
therefore, express points using degrees or radians’ latitude
and longitude.
○ As they respect the ellipsoid property of the earth, it is very hard
to make maps or plots with such coordinate systems.
○ Latitude and Longitude
■ In Geographic Coordinate Systems, we speak of latitude
and longitude.
■ Generally, the degrees are either expressed together with
a mention of North (above the equator) and South (below
the equator), East (east from Greenwich meridian), or
West (west from Greenwich meridian).
■ East/West and North/South can also be written as
negative and positive coordinates. East and North
take positive, whereas South and West take negative.
■ Although this is standard practice, this can change
depending on the exact definition of the Geographic
Coordinate System you are using.
■ In practice, there are some standards that everyone is
used to, and therefore it is best to use those.
○ WGS 1984 Geographic Coordinate System
■ The WGS 1984, also called WGS 84 or EPSG:4326, is
one of the most used Geographic Coordinate Systems.
■ It is also the reference coordinate system of GPS (Global
Positioning System) which is used in very many
applications.
■ The WGS 1984 was designed with the goal to have a
coordinate origin located at the center of mass of the
Earth.
■ The reference meridian or zero meridian is the IERS
Reference Meridian. It is very close to the Greenwich
meridian: only 5.3 arc seconds or 102 meters to the east.
○ Other Geographic Coordinate Systems
■ ETRS89 is a coordinate system that is recommended by
the European Union for use in geodata in Europe. It is
very close to the WGS 84 but has some minor differences
that make the ETRS89 not subject to change due to
continental drift.
■ Another example is the NAD-83 system, which is used
mainly for North America.
■ As the Earth is an imperfect ellipsoid, the makers of this
system wanted to take into account how much North
America deviates from an ellipsoid to perform better
in North America.
