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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#191

Post by imglorp »

jnaddef wrote: post #170
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…

It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique . If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.

Not a marketing person, but there also has to be value in the lowest possible bar to begin participating, and then a higher one later to increase engagement with public price menus. "Call now for sales pitch" is not that: it means secret deals and whatever they can haggle out of you.

Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#192

Post by jerf »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
yorwba wrote: post #122

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. 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 featur…

Fully accurately, you'll only be able to get retrospective locations (and probably some interpolation thereof), for pretty much the same reason that I can't actually tell you for sure exactly how many seconds the next decade is going to have. We won't know how many leap seconds it has until it is over, or the standards body commits to including no more. But I can tell you exactly how many seconds there were in 2000-2009 inclusive.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#193

Post by eruci »

mchannon wrote: post #83
alasdair_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. The "S2" geometry system ( http://s2geometry.io/ ) is what Google Maps and many other la…

The "Z" dimension is something I've been planning on having as part of the system as well. Since people appreciate height from street level differently than raw altitude, both will be accommodated in my system.

Interesting idea. How do you plan to implement Z and up to what height/depth?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#194

Post by feb »

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.

A few weeks ago, I hoped 3geonames could become a standard. But it has some painful limitations:

The system picks very unusual names. For example STOCARDA-KRRABA-SIPLA is in Germany, but doesn't use the German name of the city. (For those wondering, Stocarda means Stuttgart in Venetian according to Wikipedia.) That makes it harder to use for locals and can hurt the feelings of people in some regions. Also using cities of other countries can cause controversial codes, especially for young and or small countries.

3geonames has to use a language for each name. This makes it hard for people who don't speak that language to pronounce the words.

The 3geonames website describes the basic principles but there's no detailed description on how to build those codes besides (a somewhat hard to read) Perl script. For example, the documentation does not explain what encoding is used exactly.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#195

Post by turc1656 »

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart.

If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#196

Post by duhi88 »

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…

Sounds cool, but W3W solves a few different problems. It's got to sound natural, be easy to recognize by various voice systems, and easy to communicate between people.

"12 character code" might solve the problem from your perspective, but the point is that barcodes and IDs are annoying to read and copy by hand.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#197

Post by DoreenMichele »

turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia.

I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question.

I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#198

Post by qntty »

asow92 wrote: post #188
rtkwe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing 'if you have problems with it build your own' is a useless response. Anyone can totally point out issues with a thing without knowing how to fix them (especially if the concept is fundamentally flawed). Expecting people to go out and found a whole standard/business every time they make a blog post about the problems with something is ridiculous.

We're a community of builders, makers, and entrepreneurs. If we aren't here to fix the issues we see in the world, what are we doing? All I'm saying is if OP truly feels the way they do, they should try to be the change they wish to see in the world. Especially since what w3w is doing isn't technically complicated.

I have lots of complains about the world, and only so many hours in the day.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#199

Post by turc1656 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #197
turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…

Thank you. I know you weren't arguing. And it wasn't rhetorical - I really did want to know who uses it because I've never heard of it.

Thanks for the info.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#200

Post by retroafroman »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #197
turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…

I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so it doesn't even make sense that way.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.

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