DD are used in many geographic information systems (GIS), web mapping applications such as OpenStreetMap, and GPS devices.
The abbreviation [dLL] has been used in the scientific literature with locations in texts being identified as a tuple within square brackets, for example [54.5798,-3.5820].
The location [54.1855,-2.9857] is that of a 2023 piece of land art 'Out of the ground, a thread of air' by Julie Brook.
The [dLL] format can be used within publications to specify points or features of interest and within remote sensing to identify ground truth locations within Digital Earth and complying within the FAIR data principles.
[3] The American Geophysical Union (AGU) 'Landslides Blog' [4] by David Petley uses this georeferencing system.
With the increase in scientific papers needing to be searched for words, terms, phrases, authors and data, the [dLL] format can be used to link terms to author name (and by orcid), place-label location and journal or publication.
Because the earth is not flat, the precision of the longitude part of the coordinates increases the further from the equator you get.
The discrepancy of 1 second meridian arc length between equator and pole is about 0.3 metres (1 ft 0 in) because the earth is an oblate spheroid.