alt Hacker News> OSM uses a hundred nanodegrees as the grid resolution
As I said, 7-digit precision.
> You can absolutely measure tectonic drift on the OSM maps! They've existed long enough for it to be actually significant in a lot of places if you download the old data. > > This also comes up all the time when trying to overlap data from local agencies onto the OSM maps. You end up with parcel boundaries visibly off.
Yeah, assuming the person who added the features you're observing as 'visibly off' did not use 1-meter Bing imagery with a 10-meter offset...
This is not the correct way to count digit precision, which should be independent of the units used. If there were 360,000 degrees in a circle would this same precision suddenly be 4 digits? If we measured in radians would the digit precision become 9? Of course not…
Given the 100ndeg precision is across the full earth, this would be 1 part per 3.6 billion or 9.5ish digits of precision. The location of the decimal point when displaying it is irrelevant.