The DNS is a widely used and well-understood mechanism for providing a distributed database of such information and its extensible nature allows it to be used to disseminate virtually any information. Current DNS servers provide a variety of useful information about hosts in their domain but lack the ability to report a host's geographical location. 1712 DNS Encoding of Geographical Location November 1994 3. Positive numbers indicate locations north of the equator. The real number describing the latitude encoded as a printable string.
Positive numbers indicate locations east of the prime meridian.
The precision is limited by 256 charcters. Positive numbers indicate locations above mean sea-level. Although this might not be considered optimal, it allows for a very high degree of precision with an acceptable average encoded record length. The geographical location is defined with the mnemonic GPOS and type code 27. This also guarantees a concise unambiguous description of a location by enforcing three compulsory numerical values to be specified.