In my experience, early career geospatial professionals often, geo-adjacent professionals virtually always, struggle with coordinate reference systems (CRSs). Who can blame them: CRSs can be confusing from a theoretical perspective, and handling them in your day-to-day GIS workflows even more so.
In comes ihatecoordinatesystems.com by Dan Mahr: While the naming is very on the nose, this website provides an invaluable service. Structured around 12 common frustrations and questions, it serves as a refreshingly practical problem-solving guide for CRS issues.
Items include, for example (the actual section headings add the emphatic “I hate coordinate systems!” 😃):
- My dataset is off the coast of Africa! — hint: Null Island
- My dataset is not located where it should be!
- My dataset is slightly offset from where it should be!
For Switzerland, maybe we should add “My dataset seems to be located in eastern Europe / in the Atlantic off the coast of France” and “My dataset has Switzerland in portrait rather than landscape mode”…
The site offers another exceptional feature: if your dataset has an incorrect CRS specified, you can enter an approximate latitude and longitude along with the corresponding X and Y coordinates from your dataset, and ihatecoordinatesystems.com will attempt to identify the correct CRS! Needless to say, this functionality can save your day.