Is there a concise, accepted term for a piece of information that describes location (translation from origin) plus orientation (angular position / attitude), but ignoring magnitude?
In a little more detail
My formal mathematical training ended with differential equations in engineering school some 10 years ago, so forgive me if I use the wrong terms here. From what I know, and the limited fruits of my Googling:
Given three fundamental geometrical aspects in n-dimensional space:
- Location
- Orientation
- Magnitude
I can find terms that describe:
- Location only: location, point, position, location vector, position vector
- Orientation only: orientation, attitude, angular position
- Magnitude only: magnitude, length
- Orientation + magnitude: vector, spatial vector, geometric vector
I cannot find terms that describe:
- Location + orientation (this is specifically what I'm looking for)
- Location + magnitude
- Location + magnitude + direction
The context
I'm writing a code library that's focused on describing and manipulating shapes in a two dimensional plane. Both in the code itself and in my natural language discussions of it, it would be very expedient to be able to name the location-plus-orientation of the entities. Just as in engineering it is so frequent that we need to discuss the orientation-and-magnitude of things (such as forces) that we use a single word for it: commonly just 'vector'. I'm on the verge of coming up with my own hacky portmanteau, but if there is an existing accepted term I would prefer to use that.
Best Answer
Although this term can be used in a more general setting (it's very commonly used in robotics for instance to describe the space of all possible states or, for example, a robotic arm with articulated joints) I think the word configuration would be suitable for your purposes. The wiki page on configuration spaces specifically mentions the case of the term being used when describing spaces of possible positions and orientations of rigid bodies in space. This can of course be generalised to higher/lower dimensions and also take into account other parameters if needed.