11–20 of 109 posts
What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
At least wiki brightened my mood : The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis[29] using emojis, What3Birds[30] using British birds, What3fucks[31] using swear words and What3Numbers[32] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers.
Can't help but feel that this is a bad idea. From writing code, we know that the more code you use, the higher the chance of bug entering the code.
Also felt that the authorities are trying to extend the UK postcode system to the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
In situation A, it's going to be a lot quicker and clearer to communicate w3w than an ll pair (for the same precision a ll pair requires 12-18 digits, plus specificity on +/-).
In situation B it's going to be a lot easier to remember the w3w descriptor, and you still have the same advantage as in situation A.
For spoken communication, w3w's rival is "it's 123 Fake Street, I'm the bloke in the green parka", not ll pairs.
analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
According to wolframalpha (Log2(surface area of earth / 9m^2)) about 46 bits of information.
What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
by relying on context you can lower the area you need to have address combinations for. In practice you would simply repeat the addresses every couple of 1000km or so.
needing help and calling in rescue from the other side of the world while also being unable to say you are in such and such area is presumably not something that happens too often.
> duties.factory.person was located in China
I get Switzerland [1]
> refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia
I get Belarus [2]
> demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada
I get China [3]
Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting?
[1] https://what3words.com/duties.factory.person [2] https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound [3] https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise
https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs
Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities.
P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched.
>The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand.
>Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline.
>Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.