CIA factbook coordinates point to real people's houses (in the Netherlands) - Replace 52 30 N, 5 45 E with 52 24 N, 5 43 E

[jganseman]

As shown in this press article , CIA factbook geographic coordinates can accidentally point to actual homes, leading to problems when people do imprecise location lookups on websites using CIA factbook data in their GIS.

It would be helpful if data read from CIA factbook can be overridden by a default value, only for those few cases where this may be an issue. Geographical coordinates would better point to a nearby river, lake, or that country's parliament building, for example.

Either that, or convincing the CIA to change their factbook. I think doing it here is probably easier :) I am unfortunately not familiar with Ruby so can't contribute a pull request...

[geraldb]

You are welcome to provide a list of geo coords that have issues and a list of alternative mappings, for example - no ruby coding required.

[jganseman]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'd opt for literal drop-in replacements to override data, such that when the CIA would ever update data on their end, the webscraper automatically reverts back to the CIA version. Probably also the easiest to implement, with just a search-and-replace in the right spot.

For the moment I'm only aware of the Netherlands causing actual trouble. A file `with override definitions could have this content for example:

overrides.txt

# from html source : https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/geographic-coordinates 
"<p>52 30 N, 5 45 E</p>" --> "<p>52 24 N, 5 43 E</p>"