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Why Bother with What Three Words?

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#151

Post by dragonwriter »

yorwba wrote: post #122
mchannon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OOTB, but I would imagine that any geocoding system could include a suffix, like "(1987)", to know which dataset to use, so as long as there was a server providing accurate geocoding for a particular point in time. This is a service-related question, though, not a method-related question. There's no math equation that'll tell you your house is there when it used to be here.

The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. GPS coordinates are just one possible solution, there's no reason to consider equivalent encodings of the same values as the only alternatives.

> The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere.

Sure, but (1) is there a good way to get an exact description of tectonic drift?, And (2) does tectonic drift account for all shifts of surface features (intuitively, it would not necessarily for features not fixed to bedrock, which accounts for a very large share of interesting-to-humans features)?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

eruci wrote: post #21

I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org. The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA . The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

[deleted]

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#153

Post by eruci »

aembleton wrote: post #113
eruci wrote: post #21

I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org. The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA . The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

Interesting. Tried the middle of Manchester and it gave me a location starting with Leeds: https://3geonames.org/LEEDS-RAGI-USANA

That's because a) Polygons are quite large (over 20k square kilometres) b) Manchester is a long name (I limit geoname length whenever possible), c) Manchester is possibly similar sounding to another big city name.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#156

Post by eruci »

EGreg wrote: post #67
mchannon wrote: post #53

W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…

Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.

Geohash does not provide a one-to-one mapping. Geohashes "u150gxv4" and "u150gxv5" and others, decode to (50.8,4.38).

Also, geohashes of many proximal points are very different (see http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 and http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq although these locations are 1 meter apart)

Also, while geohashes are great for computer storage, they are not so much for human memory.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#160

Post by coldtea »

First of all, WTW seems like a BS solution in search of a problem that wont go anywhere, anyway. So I don't see a reason not only to bother with them, but even to be bothered by what they do. Even if needed, this is much better: https://plus.codes/

Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.".

Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat.

Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"

They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: https://xn--ls8h.la/)

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