The Wallace Line

I wrote my first attempt at Mercator ~ Latitude/Longitude conversion functions about 2 years ago when working in a case study for SPA2007. Part of this was documented in the XQuery Wikibook article on UK bus stops and Ordnance Survey coordinates. At the time I did not appreciate why my coordinates were just a bit off but fudged the difference. Last month I used the same functions to map pedal cycle data but as gardens and roofs appeared to be much more dangerous than roads, I thought I'd better try harder and learnt about Helmert Transformations.

My latest attempt is now available in the XQuery Examples Google Project and the Wikibook article has been revised to use this module. The formulae come mainly from the OS Guide to coordinate systems. PHP Code on Barry Hunter's http://www.nearby.org site was also useful.The test suite for this module is still being added to. I have struggled with rounding, needed to get positions with sensible resolutions and for testing and I'm not yet happy. Some tests need visual inspection and there is a problem with heights.

The module depends on the eXist math module, a prime candidate for cross-implementation standardization by the EXQuery initiative. In the latest version (v1-3) of the module, the math:atan2() function has parameters in the correct order (y,x) but older releases had these parameters reversed,as in v1-2.

The design of the module uses elements with attributes in the same namespace as the module to define compound structures such as LatLongs, Ellipsoids and Projections. These are defined in an associated schema. Compile-time checking in eXist is limited to checking the element name since eXist is not schema-aware although full schema-awareness would be of benefit in this module.

Suggestions for additions to this module are most welcome, as of course is any review of the code.