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I do know that in belgium they point to an area, so they're not as good as a navigation aid.
* Postcodes have a specific meaning: they're both a geographical area and a mail delivery zone (at least in the US). Replacing one short code with another, which requires a different and less reliable third-party service to correctly decode, doesn't seem like a good idea.
* Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous, well-understood, and don't require a third-party service to be online in order to correctly decode. So it doesn't seem like this can replace latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation.
* Broadly speaking, while addresses have a lot of problems, they're unambiguous with human context. So this doesn't seem like it really replace addresses either.
* For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"), I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. That might be very helpful.
Also, won't there be multiple mapcodes for a single spot and won't that require cross-association of the respective metadata? For example, consider that Central Park is also in Manhattan, also part of NYC, also in Midtown in NYC, etc.
I guess that's not necessarily a problem, but it could lead to a lot of expensive processing for frequently updated locations/boundaries (e.g. a beach, a suburban development in progress, etc.).
From the patent I get the feeling that it's a bit like a C-ary space partitioning, where C is 36 (alphabet+numbers). So the first character divides the earth in 36 regions, the second character divides that region in 36 regions, and so on.
With that in mind, I think once people would be a bit familiar with the general numbers for regions it would be pretty easy to identify what general region a mapcode would be in. So it might be a pretty good replacement of postcodes.
Or am I missing some other fundamental property of postcodes?
Objections: 1. This mapcode is country specific (!) 2. Many locations need altitude or fine lat,lon differences to differentiate them (e.g. blocks of flats, offices). 3. What's wrong with altitude, lat and lon on a given projection which can be as precise/imprecise as you want? IMO it'd be better to have a hash of lat,lon,altitude which was globally unique for each level of precision. A system like this needs to be g…
It doesn't check out:
Surface Area of Earth: 510.1 * 10^6 km^2
Distinct map codes: 36^5 = 60.466176 * 10 ^6
Area of 1 map code = 8.4 km^2
Oh! It's narrowed by country... so it doesn't address any location on Earth. Only populated areas.
If you want to actually refer to ANY location on Earth, there's another system, Ham Radio grids. It uses four to six digits and refers to either 70x100 or 3x4 miles squared. Probably useless for the business purposes, but at least it truthfully refers to any location on Earth.
Subtitle taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10975625/Did-TomT...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
Objections: 1. This mapcode is country specific (!) 2. Many locations need altitude or fine lat,lon differences to differentiate them (e.g. blocks of flats, offices). 3. What's wrong with altitude, lat and lon on a given projection which can be as precise/imprecise as you want? IMO it'd be better to have a hash of lat,lon,altitude which was globally unique for each level of precision. A system like this needs to be g…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.org/9q8yyvfekk8h
I'm a little confused about what this replaces, but it's definitely not postcodes. * Postcodes have a specific meaning: they're both a geographical area and a mail delivery zone (at least in the US). Replacing one short code with another, which requires a different and less reliable third-party service to correctly decode, doesn't seem like a good idea. * Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous, well-understood, and…
That's a much smarter idea than this mapcode system. It would make sense to replace the base-10 representation with base 36.... at least in the Roman alphabet. It would probably be smarter to pick a base that works with the world's alphabets. Oh yeah, not all the world uses alphabets!
But even then, it's not that huge of an improvement, really! Every two digits of base 36 replace three digits of base 10. (36^2 = 1296). The b36 digits replace only 4 (or 4.5) base 10 digits. 4x b36 digits replace 6 base 10 digits.
I think this may actually just be the Ham radio grid system I mentioned elsewhere.
> For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"). Here, I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc.
Heh, at this point, I'm just thinking "URL". After all, it's a Universal resource locator. How about mapcode://CentralPark/my_favorite_bench.