In
geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's sur ...
's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human or social attributes of
place identity and
sense of place than on geometry.
Types
Locality
A
locality
Locality may refer to:
* Locality (association), an association of community regeneration organizations in England
* Locality (linguistics)
* Locality (settlement)
* Suburbs and localities (Australia), in which a locality is a geographic subdivis ...
,
settlement
Settlement may refer to:
* Human settlement, a community where people live
*Settlement (structural), the distortion or disruption of parts of a building
*Closing (real estate), the final step in executing a real estate transaction
*Settlement (fin ...
, or populated place is likely to have a well-defined name but a boundary that is not well defined varies by context.
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
, for instance, has a legal boundary, but this is unlikely to completely match with general usage. An area within a town, such as
Covent Garden in London, also almost always has some ambiguity as to its extent. In geography, location is considered to be more precise than "place".
Relative location
A relative location, or situation, is described as a displacement from another site. An example is "3 miles northwest of
Seattle".
Absolute location
An absolute location can be designated using a specific pairing of
latitude and
longitude in a
Cartesian coordinate grid (for example, a
spherical coordinate system or an ellipsoid-based system such as the
World Geodetic System) or similar methods. For example, the position of
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
in the United States can be expressed using the coordinate system as the location 40.7128°N (latitude), 74.0060°W (longitude).
Absolute locations are also relative locations, since even absolute locations are expressed relative to something else. For example, longitude is the number of degrees east or west of the
Prime Meridian, a line arbitrarily chosen to pass through
Greenwich, England. Similarly, latitude is the number of degrees north or south of the
equator. Because latitude and longitude are expressed ''relative'' to these lines, a position expressed in latitude and longitude is also a relative location.
See also
*
*
*
*
*
*
Locale (geographic)
*
Location, Location, Location
*
Location Location Location Australia
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Location (Geography)
Cartography
*