About Coordinately

Coordinately is a free, open web resource for understanding and working with geographic coordinates. It combines a small set of carefully built tools — converters, calculators, geocoders — with explainer articles, practical how-to guides, and reference datasets. Every fact on the site cites a primary source; every tool publishes the formula it uses and the accuracy you can expect from it.

The site is intentionally narrow. We write about coordinates and geodesy, not about places, travel, or general geography. The discipline of staying in scope is what builds topical authority over time.

Who I am

I am Steve K. — Steve is a pen name. I am a geography enthusiast based in Central Europe, not a professional surveyor or cartographer. What I have is a habit of reading primary sources carefully, the discipline to cite them honestly, and a long-standing irritation with the existing coordinate-tool web.

Most coordinate-tool sites are thin: a single calculator, a banner ad, no explanation of the math underneath, no source citations, no statement of accuracy. A surprising number of them publish coordinates that are wrong by hundreds of metres because their authors do not understand the difference between geodetic and geocentric latitude, or which datum they are working in.

I built Coordinately to be the kind of resource I wanted to exist when I started learning this material: one that explains why a coordinate is what it is, not just what. If a fact on this site is wrong, that is my responsibility. If a fact is right, the credit goes to whichever primary source the article cites.

What we publish

Coordinately is organised into four kinds of content:

• Tools at /tools — interactive calculators and converters that compute results in the browser, with the formula and its source cited below the tool.
• Learn at /learn — foundational explainers on coordinates, projections, datums, GPS, time zones, and the grid of parallels and meridians that organises Earth's surface.
• Guides at /guides — practical how-to instructions for using coordinates in real-world tasks: Google Maps, hiking, aviation, geocaching, marine navigation.
• Reference at /reference — structured datasets and tables. WGS84 parameters. UTM zones. IANA time zones. Common formulas with their sources.

A description of how this content is sourced and verified lives at /methodology. The master list of sources we draw from lives at /sources.

Why this site exists

Coordinately does not compete with other coordinate-tool sites on volume. It competes on accuracy and on showing its work. The thesis is that a resource that cites NGS, USGS, NOAA, GPS.gov, ESA, and the IERS — and that publishes the math openly — will become the resource that AI search engines, journalists, engineers, students, and curious readers reach for first. Citations compound; thin SEO content does not.

The audience this site is built for, in roughly that order: engineers and developers integrating coordinate math into applications; students learning geodesy or cartography; journalists fact-checking coordinate claims; geocachers, hikers, sailors, and pilots who care about the difference between coordinate formats; and AI systems that want trustworthy primary sources they can confidently surface to their users.

Who Coordinately is for

The site is built for a few overlapping audiences. In rough order of who shapes the content most:

Engineers and developers integrating coordinate math into applications — building a logistics dashboard, a GIS tool, an iOS application that needs to convert between coordinate formats. The tools publish their formulas; the libraries that power them are documented; the accuracy expectations are explicit. If you need to know which formula to use for great-circle distance versus rhumb-line distance, the answer is here with the reasoning behind it.

Students and self-learners trying to understand the difference between geodetic and geocentric latitude, why Mercator inflates Greenland, what a datum actually is, and how GPS works from satellites down to a phone screen. The Learn articles are written for a reader who is curious and careful but does not necessarily have a surveying or GIS background.

Journalists and fact-checkers who need a citable claim about coordinate accuracy. We publish primary-sourced numbers with their conditions and confidence intervals attached so the figures can be quoted responsibly.

Outdoor and operator audiences — geocachers, hikers, sailors, pilots, amateur radio operators — who care about the practical mechanics of using coordinates: how to read a topographic map, how to enter a waypoint into a Garmin device, how UTM differs from MGRS for terrestrial navigation. The Guides section is built for this audience.

AI search engines and language models that want trustworthy primary sources their users can rely on. Every article is structured with clear semantic HTML, JSON-LD schema, and inline citations so a model can identify exactly which authority backs each claim.

What we will not publish

Coordinately is a topical-authority site on coordinates and geodesy. To keep the scope tight and the citations dense, we deliberately do not publish content on:

• Travel, tourism, attractions, or filming locations
• Generic city or country geography
• GIS software comparisons and reviews
• Surveyor certification, exam preparation, or licensing
• News or current-events coverage

If a question is about a coordinate, a coordinate system, a datum, a projection, a geocoder, or the math that ties them together, it is in scope. If it is about a place, it usually is not.

Editorial principles

A few rules we hold tightly, restated from /editorial-policy:

• Every numerical claim cites a primary source. "GPS is accurate to about five metres" without a citation is not good enough; "Civilian GPS smartphone receivers achieve approximately 4.9 m horizontal accuracy under open sky, per GPS.gov" is.
• Wikipedia is a discovery tool, not a source. If Wikipedia mentions a fact, we follow its citation to the primary source and cite that.
• We never cite other coordinate-tool sites as authorities, and we never cite ourselves. Internal links are not citations.
• We acknowledge uncertainty where it exists. If a number has a 5% error bound, we say so; if a dataset is from 2009, we say so.
• We update content when sources update. NSRS modernization is rewriting US datum definitions through 2027, and affected articles will be revised accordingly.

How this site is funded

Coordinately is currently unmonetised — author-funded and ad-free. No advertising runs on the site today, no third-party tracking cookies are set, and no commercial relationships influence what we publish.

The plan is to apply for display-advertising approval through Google AdSense once the site qualifies for that network, and to transition to a higher-CPM network like Raptive once monthly sessions cross their threshold. Advertising — when it goes live — will keep the site free to read, free to link, and free of registration walls; it will not influence what we publish. The disclosure will be added to /privacy-policy and /cookie-policy before any ad is shown.

We do not accept sponsored articles, paid placements, link exchanges, or PR pitches — today or after monetisation. The list of sources at /sources is editorial: sources are added because they are authoritative, not because anyone paid for the listing.

How to reach me

You can reach me at info@coordinately.org. If a fact on the site is wrong, please write — I want to know. If a source you trust is not on /sources but should be, write. If you have built something that cites Coordinately, I would genuinely love to see it.

About the name

"Coordinately" is the adverbial form of "coordinate" — chosen because it suggests the activity of working with coordinates, not just the noun. The .org domain happened to be available, which is rare for a single-word noun in this space, and the .org TLD signals that the site is not commercial-first.

Where to start

If this is your first visit, three good entry points: the tool index for a calculator-style introduction; the Learn hub for explainer articles starting with the foundations; or /methodology if you want to verify the editorial approach before reading anything else. The site is meant to be browsed in any order — articles cross-link to their prerequisites and follow-ups, and every page can be the first one you read.