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What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

what3words.com

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Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

#22

Post by cjrsheldrick »

mostly_harmless wrote: post #16

The biggest problem I see with these global addressing schemes is that they have nothing to do with the location, and they dont have any locality. Snake.Dog.Rabbit is in a location with no snakes, dogs or rabbits and is right next to Lamp.Chair.Guitar? Theres no visible logic to it. its just easier to say 123 River Road. By the name you know its likely to be near a river, and it will be right next to 124 River Road

That's true when the street address works. But in a lot of the world, street addressing is poor and occasionally non-existent. Also even in countries where street addressing works well, big areas (parks, beaches, stadium entrances, car park entrances) don't have street addresses and another simple referencing system can be helpful. what3words is a human-friendly version of GPS co-ordinates which are too long and impractical for everyday use by human beings.

Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

#23

Post by freyfogle »

codingdave wrote: post #13

Clever, but not very practical. Addressing and city/state/country names are very well ingrained into our culture and have real-world meaning. We can understand the general location of an address just by reading it. w3w takes all context out of location names, and forces you to map it with a tool. I don't see how that will improve anything. As you can purchase a one word name for a specific location, this really just…

You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses.

Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone calls to find the place.

Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

#24

Post by freyfogle »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #17

Tl;dr DNS (human readble names) for physical locations on earths surface. It's a nice idea "I will meet you at chair.lion.knowledge" is better than meet you at grid location 123.456.5676 But to be honest I know roughly where in London SW1 2EE is and the amount of times I will need that level of accuracy for an address in Mumbai or LA is quite limited. In addition "chair.lion.zebra" is actually less readable to billio…

It works in many different languages, including many non-latin script languages.

Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

#26

Post by notahacker »

cjrsheldrick wrote: post #8
quarterto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you're one letter away from "oops, accidentally shipped my package to Australia"

It's much better to be so far away you know it's wrong at the searching stage, rather than 3 miles away as with similar postcodes, co-ordinates etc when you don't know it's wrong which often results in delays/wasted journeys.

It's much better still not to have the ambiguity. And a non-plural version of my home three words is in the same city, just the wrong side...

Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

#29

Post by gren »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #19

This is only tangentially related in that it's not using ordinary words. But GeoHash always struck me as a clever encoding for lat/lon pairs. Locations look like "u4pruydqqvj", so gibberish, but concise. The neat thing is geohash is a progressive encoding so you can lop off characters from the right and still be naming the same area, just less precisely. Ie while u4pruydqqvj is a specific point in Denmark u4pru is ju…

Geohash looks brillant!
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