Time Zone Information
Geolocating And Timezone Names
A shapefile of the geographic extent of the timezone database based mostly off of Open Street Map data. All of the borders between countries, states and cities come directly from Open Street Map. This shapefile also includes the territorial waters of countries as defined in Open Street Map. The shapefile can be found in the project releases:
- A tool to extract data from Open Street Map (OSM) to build the boundaries of the world's timezones
https://github.com/evansiroky/timezone-boundary-builder
The site https://www.geonames.org provides a way to retrieve information for specific locations worldwide. There is also an API available that can be used to retrieve specific information, e.g.:
In the URL above, the username
parameter should be replaced by a real user ID, which can be registered here without charge:
http://www.geonames.org/login
Localized names of time zone ranges are maintained by the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR):
A list of more time zone geolocation projects can be found here:
Discussions
An article from 2016 on a proposal to remove time zones:
- The radical plan to destroy time zones
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/12/the-radical-plan-to-destroy-time-zones-2/?utm_term=.446587ff9564
In February 2019 there was a EU time zone workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, initiated by CalConnect after the EU's recently proposed
changes to DST rules. A summary has been posted on the timezonediscuss-l
mailing list:
A blog article by Tony Finch that highlights and discusses common problems with the way time zone data is currently being used in applications and data models:
- iCalendar is wrong - Tony Finch's blog
https://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html
— Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki@meinberg.de 2019-02-28