Geo tag

A geo-tag is a meta-element that provides information about the geographical position of numerous media such as photos, videos or websites . Usually longitude and latitude are saved or additional information such as country, altitude or place names are often included. Geo-tags are popular on photos ( geotagging ), weblogs, and other personal pages.

Structure of geo-tags

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The structure of geo-tags according to XHTML would be made up of the following lines for the website of the city of Graz, for example.

<meta name="geo.region" content="AT-6" />

The meta tag geo.regioncontains the country code according to ISO 3166-1 (for example AT for Austria or DE for Germany) and the federal state according to ISO 3166-2 (for example AT-6 for Styria or DE-BY for Bavaria).

<meta name="geo.placename" content="Graz" />

The meta tag geo.placenamecontains the name of the place or city.

<meta name="geo.position" content="47.0667;15.4500" />

The meta tag geo.positioncontains information about the longitude and latitude. Depending on the accuracy of this information, you can even specify exact positions within a street. Coordinates with two decimal places are accurate to around 1 km, four decimal places to around 10 m.

<meta name="ICBM" content="47.0667, 15.4500" />

Some services look for what is called the ICBM tag. Therefore it makes sense and does not hurt to include this. The abbreviation ICBM stands for intercontinental ballistic missile - an old, black and humorous allusion to the possible use of such coordinates.

Meaning in search queries

In the case of location-independent search queries, the meaning of the geo tags is hardly given. On the other hand, in the case of location-based search queries (for example “Pizzeria Berlin”), the advantages of these tags cannot be disregarded, especially when one takes into account that search queries are often location-based. However, according to official reports, geo tags are not evaluated by major search engines such as Google. Instead, for example, the address, directories and similar information given in plain text on the website are used.

Since 2009, the accuracy of search providers such as Google , Yahoo and Bing has been improved, so that geo-related results on the location of the searcher are provided without place names. This is implemented in Google News results. The geographic allocation is the currently completed step in the further development of the search results. This applies to websites, images, multimedia content and other documents.

A number of smart phone apps for augmented reality or similar require the geo-tag information and therefore use services that evaluate geo-tag information.

Cloud computing

In cloud computing , a geo-tag is stored in a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This allows a server to be assigned to a geographic region.

This is necessary because network connections can have a high latency . The work orders executed on the server should therefore be as close as possible to the data to be processed. In addition, services must be carried out as close as possible to the clients . The data to be processed can also be subject to legal or economic framework conditions, which geographically restrict the transmission and processing of this data.

See also : Safe Harbor

Another reason can be the timely processing of work orders. In order to determine the correct time, the exact position of the server must be known. For this purpose, GPS receivers are used in data centers , which synchronize the time with an atomic clock .

See also : Spanner (database)

See also

• Geocoding
• Geotargeting

Web links

• IETF Geographic Location / Privacy (geopriv) Group
• W3C / IETF I-Draft for HTML geotags
• Geo tag generator at myGeoPosition.com - Generates geotags from addresses, manual fine correction in a map and blurring possible for data protection. Supports reverse search (entering URL leads to display on map). (multilingual)
• Geo Tag Explanation and Generator at PromoMasters.at - Explains Geo Tags and their effects in search engine marketing and provides a free Geo Meta Tags Generator (German).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dominik Kremer: Reconstruction of places as a social phenomenon: Geoinformatical analysis of semantically annotated behavioral data . University of Bamberg Press, 2018, ISBN 978-3-86309-579-6 ( google.de [accessed April 3, 2019]).
2. ↑ Geotag. In: Cloud Patterns. Arcitura Education Inc. , accessed May 7, 2017 .