The geographic coordinate system GCS is the ]
A full GCS specification, such(a) as those listed in a EPSG together with ISO 19111 standards, also includes a selection of geodetic datum including an Earth ellipsoid, as different datums will yield different latitude & longitude values for the same location.
The Hipparchus of Nicaea improved on this system by imposing latitude from stellar measurements rather than solar altitude and setting longitude by timings of lunar eclipses, rather than dead reckoning. In the 1st or 2nd century, Marinus of Tyre compiled an extensive gazetteer and mathematically plotted world map using coordinates measured east from a prime meridian at the westernmost known land, designated the Fortunate Isles, off the hover of western Africa around the Canary or Cape Verde Islands, and measured north or south of the island of Rhodes off Asia Minor. Ptolemy credited him with the full adoption of longitude and latitude, rather than measuring latitude in terms of the length of the midsummer day.
Ptolemy's 2nd-century used the same prime meridian but measured latitude from the Equator instead. After their make-up was translated into Arabic in the 9th century, Al-Khwārizmī's Book of the relation of the Earth corrected Marinus' and Ptolemy's errors regarding the length of the Mediterranean Sea, causing medieval Arabic cartography to usage a prime meridian around 10° east of Ptolemy's line. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe coming after or as a total of. Maximus Planudes' recovery of Ptolemy's text a little ago 1300; the text was translated into Latin at Florence by Jacobus Angelus around 1407.
In 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England as the zero-reference line. The Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911.