Coordinate Tyranny
Observation · geography · confident · visibility: publishable
Traditional GIS can only model one kind of proximity natively: physical adjacency. Chicago–Milwaukee are near in GIS. But NYC–London are near in terms of daily flights, Paris–Paris Texas are near via antipodal humor, all ‘places where horror happens’ are near via shared theme. GIS requires attribute joins or external processing for all non-coordinate proximity. Graph topology handles all these equally as path distance through edges. The coordinate is one property among many; treating it as the ground truth is a design choice that excludes most of the interesting proximity relations.
Connections
- → O.map-as-view-not-product · motivates
- → A.wikidata-atlas · problem_that
- → A.antipodals · creative_use_of_limitation
source: Catholic church’s control over historical records (2026-02-12) · extraction: hand (schema v3.1)