I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?
For places that don't have an adress or the adress is ambigious
FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
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Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#12[deleted]
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#13I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?
Telling a location over the phone when you are in an emergency comes to mind. Easier to remember than a series of numbers as is the case latitude/longitude.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#14neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
w3w considers the disambiguity an asset. Almost like a check sum. If you enter an address, and it's in the middle of the Pacific, you know you wrote it down wrong.
that's an interesting point, but in practice I don't see how it's meaningful. If you write down a plus code and end up in a similar area, you contact the person with the address and figure it out without much issue. If you can't contact that person again, well you're at least most likely to be in the area and can ask around for directions.
with w3w if you can't contact the person with the address again, you've no idea where on the planet this place might be.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#15This is a bit like my http://wherewords.id that I made as a fun holiday project. I used the S2 cells (same as the one used by pokemon go), and my own wordlist. Using this approach, I believe I got accuracy down to squares of approximately 2x2 metres with 4 words (from a wordlist of 4096 words). FixPhrase only claims accuracy of 11m, which isn't terrible, but won't locate a single parking space or front door particularly well.
The wordlist is surprisingly hard work. The first location I clicked on fixphrase had as one of its words 'french'. That's potentially pretty confusing. It's super hard to get a good wordlist, and it's not just negative words, words that are particularly unusual or words likely to create bad combinations, it's also removing homonyms, words likely to be confused (capital/capitol, carless/careless), geographic words, or words that are combinations of other words in the word list.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#16It looks like the key difference between this and what3words is that squares near each other have mostly the same words. With only the last word changing for adjacent squares, and even then they are similar. I can see the motivation for this (you can abbreviate to fewer words for a general area), but alto suspect it is partially about the W3w patent. However it also increases the risk of being slightly wrong with a l…
Why would it increase the risk of being slightly wrong? If anything, it helps to have consistent prefixes because you make it more likely that someone will be able to recognise areas, or know when places are near to other places.
If the system allows it, you can also use fewer words to target a bigger area. For example https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ is an area of Paris, while https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder is a specific point in the Gare du Nord. Or if you're standing in Paris, talking to someone else in Paris, you can use context and drop the 'juniper'.
The only real reason I think it can be good to avoid a hierarchy is because having one makes the sensitivity of the word list much more significant. For example, if an entire country has a negative association word like 'stingy' or 'lying' in its first word, that could be a significant problem.
If you really need a checksum, https://wherewords.id/ supports an optional emoji checksum.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#17What stops W3W legal team shutting down this ohe like they did to the other open source implementation?
I would also like to know why this isn't considered patent infringement. https://patents.justia.com/assignee/what3words-limited --- I've poked around the website. They claim an "open-source, patent-free algorithm" is used, and therefore the entire concept doesn't infringe on W3W's patents. Yikes. They can expect letters and lawyers. https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/wiki/How-It...
The fact that W3W managed to get their patent issued is pretty hilarious in light of this: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#18neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
The point of using words is that it should be more reliable when roundtripping via voice or memory. I think it's much easier for people to remember 'reader giraffe suppose advance' than WF24+VMR
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#19neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
The point of using words is that it should be more reliable when roundtripping via voice or memory. I think it's much easier for people to remember 'reader giraffe suppose advance' than WF24+VMR
w3w fails at this, because it uses words that sound similar (recede reseed, innocence innocents, and many others: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...). Good luck playing spelling bee of "clairvoyants" in emergency.
Some words may also be difficult to pronounce/hear/spell by non-native speakers. Unlike regular sentences, there's no context to disambiguate.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#20It looks like the key difference between this and what3words is that squares near each other have mostly the same words. With only the last word changing for adjacent squares, and even then they are similar. I can see the motivation for this (you can abbreviate to fewer words for a general area), but alto suspect it is partially about the W3w patent. However it also increases the risk of being slightly wrong with a l…
Why would it increase the risk of being slightly wrong? If anything, it helps to have consistent prefixes because you make it more likely that someone will be able to recognise areas, or know when places are near to other places. If the system allows it, you can also use fewer words to target a bigger area. For example https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ is an area of Paris, while https://wherewords.id/juniper/de…
The risk comes from mishearing someone. Especially relevant in Europe with all the different accents.
With w3w, Gare Du Nord is sunshine.frame.acted while sunshine.frames.acted is Abu Dhabi and sunshine.frame.actor is in Malaysia.
https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor
While in wherewords.id, changing rate to fate or late or gate still produces Paris, but wrong location.
https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder
Having an accurate location is important for emergency services. If you’re on a phone call trying to get an ambulance for someone having a seizure, or reporting a fire, shooting, whatever, it’s important to get the accurate location straight away.
If the call centre person misheard your location, but the code is still in Paris, they will think it’s correct and dispatch to the wrong location. It would take too much time after realising the mistake to get the correct location. So with w3w it is far more obvious when these issues happen as suddenly the map is showing as Middle East or Asia, not Paris!
I don’t think an emoji checksum would help here either. Wink. Was that a tongue wink or smirk or etc.
(Full disclaimer: I don’t see the point in w3w either. It assumes people are prepared in advance to have the app on their phone, otherwise if they need to download it/visit its site they have internet so there are better ways of getting the location)