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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#171

Post by bradknowles »

stuart78 wrote: post #165

W3W seems to me like it adds more confusion to finding places than it adds clarity. The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. This is exhibited in two of the carousels on their homepage: * actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on item…

They should be using something like the EFF's word lists: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#172

Post by improbable22 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #168

I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely. For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses…

Indeed it seems neat. And you will learn to ignore CM87 the way you (used to) ignore phone area codes.

Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#173

Post by mxfh »

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…

"The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use." There is a difference between a projected coordinate system (like Mercator) and geographic coordinate systems. In Mercator you use projected Mercator-Meters not Latitude and Longitude. All you need to know for local R² (2D Euclidean) estimates, is that longitudes scale with cos(latitude), that's it. How does your system handle 89°N 0°W, and 89°N, 180°W ? Does it infer 222km or 346km? If it's the latter, it's not spherical as in S².

There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage.

Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember.

So I'm watching ;)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#174

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

velcrovan wrote: post #7

There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t scalar. From another W3W-criticism blog post ( https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html ): “An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores. “If you have a powerful computer in y…

> You can tell the search and rescue team that you’ve twisted your ankle at ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you’ve moved 3 meters east, you’re at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic crutch has exhausted its usefulness.

This represents my disappointment as well. When I initially heard of the system, I thought it was hierarchical; the first word describing some larger chunk, the second describing a chunk within that chunk, and the third describing the 10' x 10' block nested at the bottom. That would have been a fairly cool thing; you could easily go for less precision in order to represent a larger space -- your neighborhood, for instance. Instead, it just feels entirely non-intuitive for a system that seems to have been created to offer mnemonic names for spaces.

Perhaps there are technological limitations to the problem that I can't see that prevent a hierarchical solution from being possible or feasible. But I just see little value in an 'addressing' system where one cell's address is totally unrelated to the cells adjoining it.

edit: I've just found w3w's justifications for a non-hierarchical system on their site and they seem weak to me, but who knows, I'm no expert on the matter. -- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207768985-W...

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#175

Post by mirimir »

delecti wrote: post #117
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…

To be fair, W3W is already "spheroid-optimized", in that the named squares are quite close to 10'x10' both at the equator and poles. There are grid "skips" (see one here [1]) every so often to keep all of the squares close to the same size. [1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696 Also don't discount the benefit of their distribution of the words. If you're using voice input and trying to get somewhere, the system…

WTF?

"captain.water.water" => ~90 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky

"captains.water.water" => island in the North Atlantic

That's crazy. I mean, "..water" should be a contiguous area. With "*.water.water" a contiguous part of it.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#176

Post by __jal »

mchannon wrote: post #76
darkstar999 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it account for geological drifting? This is probably the most important social issue with these kind of systems.

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.

...Which defeats the "simple" in 3-words pitch.

"No, I'm `heartfelt-triple-coma` from 2003, not current. Oh, you're using a Spanish-language phone; I don't know which dataset you use."

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#177

Post by dragonwriter »

yorwba wrote: post #169
dragonwriter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 featur…

(1) By measuring the location of a few designated landmarks, it should be possible to extrapolate tectonic-level shifts to all other points on the same plate pretty accurately. (2) Changes on a smaller scale, e.g. due to a landslide, are probably less surprising when they cause a change in location codes. On the other hand, there might be some houses on a hill somewhere slowly sliding down, where the system doesn't w…

> By measuring the location of a few designated landmarks, it should be possible to extrapolate tectonic-level shifts to all other points on the same plate pretty accurately.

I would think you'd need a lot of targets near plate boundaries (where deformation is high for that reason) as well as in known regions of intraplate deformation.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#178

Post by ghayes »

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…

I thought this was a wink and a nod to just using standard latitude/longitude. Doesn't lat/long naturally solve each of your bullet points?

•Length-optimized. More digits = more precision, check.

•Precision optimized. Except for adding zeros, check.

•Precision-focused. Sig figs cover this.

•Logic-optimized. Adding or subtracting to lat or long respectively.

•Spheroid-optimized. I believe this applies to latitude and longitude, as well, since there's less surface area for a given coordinate space. Though, maybe it's the reverse, that it's more precise at the poles.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#179

Post by LeoPanthera »

improbable22 wrote: post #172
LeoPanthera wrote: post #168

I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely. For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses…

Indeed it seems neat. And you will learn to ignore CM87 the way you (used to) ignore phone area codes. Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?

Yes. Less than a building, in fact. CM87TT20SV is the front entrance.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#180

Post by bradknowles »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #129
aembleton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the emoji one will work across languages.

Has anyone else tried to look up a location, find the emoji(s) for it and then put the text for it back into the search bar? It seems to not do reverse lookup, making it completely useless as far as I can tell. You can find the emoji(s) for a place, but not a place that corresponds to the emojis.

Maybe that's a feature?

;)

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