I'm not affiliated to map code http://www.mapcode.com/ but they also have a similar idea.
What I like about their approach is that you don't run the risk of your business having a silly sounding address.
Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
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Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not particularly reassuring, can't someone just create an open system with a similar concept and release the mapping.
When someone told about what3words, they also told me that they made money by selling shorter or more pleasant word pairings to whoever was willing to pay, but the only reference to that I could find is [0]. Having that requirement would make it much more difficult to build such a system. Apart from that, it's basically "just" geohashes with a different (population-density based) encoding. [0]: https://techcrunch.com…
Those were called One Words. That was their old businesses model and abandoned/pivoted.
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#43I’ve never thought about this, but what3words could be hugely helpful for me. My house is essentially located between two streets, and the street name in the address isn’t the actual street where my mailbox is or where you’d enter the gate, so loosing packages is common and it’s hard to explain to friends how to find me
It seems like what3words is precisely as helpful as standard coordinates, with the exception that coordinates don't depend on a proprietary company.
It seems to be me to be roughly analogous to the hostname IP mapping; they both describe the same place, but one is more memorable and easier to communicate.
This company seems a far cry from ICANN, however.
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#44Only maps 2d space, so I'm not sure how they deal with apartment buildings and high rise offices. Because anyone can pick whatever 3m square portion of the building they want to, it seems it would make mail sorting harder...a bundle for one specific building.
From the article, it seems that it is best-applied in situations where the following constraints apply:
1. No existing national addressing system exists.
2. Streets are not named (or do not exist).
3. The address space to be described is extremely sparse.
4. Mailing addresses are transient (i.e. buildings move, as tents, vehicles, etc).
A dense apartment building in an urban area is unlikely to be described by any of these constraints.
As mentioned elsewhere, these problems can also be solved by latitude/longitude coordinates. However, this simply provides a friendlier "hostname" convention to a numeric backend.
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#45Only maps 2d space, so I'm not sure how they deal with apartment buildings and high rise offices. Because anyone can pick whatever 3m square portion of the building they want to, it seems it would make mail sorting harder...a bundle for one specific building.
From the article, it seems that it is best-applied in situations where the following constraints apply: 1. No existing national addressing system exists. 2. Streets are not named (or do not exist). 3. The address space to be described is extremely sparse. 4. Mailing addresses are transient (i.e. buildings move, as tents, vehicles, etc). A dense apartment building in an urban area is unlikely to be described by any of…
The article does feature a picture from somewhere in Nigeria, featuring a cluster of high rise buildings, and one of their 3 word addresses pointing toward them.
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#46Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap founder and what3words employee on why what3words is a good thing: https://stevecoast.com/2016/03/25/why-i-like-what3words/
A what3words employee saying what3words is a good thing? Especially one whose position is literally called Chief Evangelist[0]? How shocking.
Conversely, (as another HN user pointed out), OpenStreetMap's opinion of what3words is quite negative: "what3words is a commercial, non-open, patented location reference schema. Open data advocates (such as the OpenStreetMap community) would generally advise against adopting it at all."[1]
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#47Its time someone starts an initiative to build a database of these locations outside of what3words. Once a location (3 words) is added, translated into a lat lon, it just a matter of looking it up.
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
When all you need now is '123 Fake St, 12345' to get a map of a location and directions to it on your phone, not much. You can locate '123 Fake St, 12345' without a phone, so it wins.
As others have pointed out, lots of places in underdeveloped countries don't have street names and numbers.
As others have pointed out, and I quote, "a proprietary system from a for-profit company should not be used as the basis for addressing in any country."
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#49Its time someone starts an initiative to build a database of these locations outside of what3words. Once a location (3 words) is added, translated into a lat lon, it just a matter of looking it up.
Only 57 trillion 3x3 meter
squares to resolve...
Re: Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
#50Its time someone starts an initiative to build a database of these locations outside of what3words. Once a location (3 words) is added, translated into a lat lon, it just a matter of looking it up.
Only 57 trillion 3x3 meter squares to resolve...
Yes, its good to have a closer look at the numbers involved :-)
I found the habitual part of Earth to be 24,642,757 square miles [0]. A square mile = 2589988.11 square meter [Google].
So that comes close to 7.1 trillion locations. It results in 7000 Gb for each byte stored.
This makes me wonder if there is some kind of algorithm is involved. The location names seem randomly but might not be. Maybe its only random for the superficial observer. Which could mean with a sufficient big enough sample the algorithm can be found. Maybe even a relative small dataset with locations close to each other could work already.