Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#61

Post by rvnx »

sandGorgon wrote: post #20

Google "Plus Codes" are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums. https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native…

If it wasn't funded and publicised by Google, I think Plus codes would have disappeared already. These codes feel quite difficult to remember and less logical than the long/lat that they try to replace; additionally, the letters are very ambiguous to pronounce in English for a non-native (E and I, J and G).

It feels like it was a quick hack of base64-ish encoding of the long/lat that evolved into a product to get an internal promotion

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#62

Post by [deleted] »

akira2501 wrote: post #26
cbo100 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords. The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.

> The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I mean.. as opposed to two numbers? A slow speed high error correction audio encoding of them would be easy. Call emergency services, press the button, they decode the tones, immediate, accurate, simple. If you mixed the calling and playback into a single action, you could make calls and direct people without even the ability to speak.

[deleted]

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#63

Post by onion2k »

sandGorgon wrote: post #52
neolog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...

> Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.

That's a problem if you don't know anything more than the three words, but it's quite useful if you do. For example, if you know someone is travelling in South America then the huge difference means one is obviously wrong. It would be more problematic if the two locations were similar.

Making it clear when something is incorrect for a given context is quite a helpful feature. But you need to have the necessary context.

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#65

Post by zimpenfish »

moooo99 wrote: post #40
tomcooks wrote: post #33

Terrible: based on a single language, proprietary, IP owners being assholes, creates problems to the user case it was supposedly designed for, doesn't feature distance computing algorithms, takes even more space in a DB cell than latlong, I can go on for days. Use numbers.

There are really are issues with such a system and you listed some of them, but your recommendation makes me feel like you didn't read beyond the headline. They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends, so searching for a solution makes ab…

> With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends

Although the numeric location gets more precise as you add more numbers - if they only get 3 decimal places, that's about 110x80m in the UK.

If you use degrees, minutes and seconds, you only need 6 numbers to get ~30x20m in the UK (and a decimal place on the seconds brings it down to ~3x2m - the same as W3W.)

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#66

Post by VBprogrammer »

m12k wrote: post #51

Sounds like they need to prune the word list and/or group together possible mispronunciations, misspellings and misreadings. If "correct horse battery" is a location, then "correct hose battery" and "correct house battery" need to be synonyms of the same location, not alternate locations. Either that or remove horse, hose and house from the word list entirely.

Shouldn't those things be as far apart as possible? Then the conversation would be

Person: "emm, I'm lost on the Yorkshire Moors...".

Rescuer: "no problem sir, just take advantage of the completely flawless wireless telephony system we have to download this app..."

Person: "ok, it says I'm at correct house battery"

Rescuer: "hmm, I'm showing you at the top of a mountain in Nepal. Let's try that again..."

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#67

Post by mro_name »

I have to mention Geohash because it's easy to spell, licence free, variable precision, what else? Plug: https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi

That said, having familiar words in your (local?) alphabet is charming. But for public good it HAS to be public domain (the alphabet + algo, not the service, however).

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#68

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

7952 wrote: post #44
bhawks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. Lat longs usability isn't the best (people don't like long numbers). But it's failure mode won't send you to Vietnam when you meant a public park in the UK. even if this system is constrained with simple, short, not confusable words (which would entail shrinking the earth or lowering the resolution) the fact that addresses are randomly assigned extremely reduces it's utility. Can you look at 2 addresses and kno…

Getting sent 1km or even 100m away by accident could be critical depending on the geography. The closeness of the numbers increases that possibility. And an error that reports Vietnam is easy to coorrect.

Easy to recognise. I'm not sure the emergency services having to play a process-of-elimination word game is 'easy to correct'.

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#69

Post by jonatron »

sneak wrote: post #9

W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation. It's also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for. Avoid using or promoting this system.

The problem with the site you mentioned is that it was a clear cut case of copyright, trademark, and patent infringement all in one. I think the creator remained anonymous because they knew this.

I agree that it's not well designed and shouldn't be used.

Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

#70

Post by Brainmulch »

politelemon wrote: post #56
moooo99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are really are issues with such a system and you listed some of them, but your recommendation makes me feel like you didn't read beyond the headline. They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends, so searching for a solution makes ab…

> They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. That doesn't sound correct. Numbers are universal, easier to remember, and less ambiguous than three English words. I don't see how it's more error prone to use numbers based systems, which many organisations and communities have been using for decades. And also considering the length of the three…

Woah I really have to disagree with numbers being easier to remember. I would imagine 3x words is far easier to remember than 12-16 numbers, and I don't see how it couldn't not be the case. The problem with using words that I see are as you've said - English locale isn't global, words without context can be misheard easily etc
Post reply on HN