Insignificant Figures
20 days ago
- Complaint about excessive decimal places in open datasets, especially geographic coordinates, often due to software defaults.
- Fifteen decimal places is common; up to 51 has been seen, far beyond real measurement accuracy.
- Unnecessary decimals increase file sizes by 20-40%; truncating to 5-6 decimal places can significantly reduce size.
- Example: ONS ward boundary dataset could shrink from 46.5 MB to 24.8 MB by reducing precision.
- Plea to data publishers to match export precision to actual data accuracy to save bandwidth.