John - Appreciate the response. The reason why I asked this question is
specifically for operations within PostGIS that will utilize the point
values and so it is pretty important that the point values are entered
correctly. Your description of X representing east/west and Y representing
north/south is exactly why this is such a confusing issue because an
east/west coordinate value is a longitude value while north/south is a
latitude value so X can't represent an longitude value representing
east/west. In the example I cited, it listed the X value as -194. While
that value is invalid it is supposed to represent the longitude value. In
one sense, I can see X representing latitude if you see X as the horizontal
plane and Y as the vertical plane because latitude rings are horizontal and
longitude rings are vertical, and again, this is why this can get confusing
because people will interpret things differently. Part of this confusion
with X vs Y stems from some of the JavaScript mapping APIs (like Google Maps
and OpenLayers) where one API will list X as a latitude and the other will
list X as a longitude.
--
View this message in context:
http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/Format-of-Pioint-datatype-lat-long-or-long-lat-tp5784939p5784954.html
Sent from the PostgreSQL - general mailing list archive at Nabble.com.