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Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

mapcode.com

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Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#61

Post by Alupis »

lstamour wrote: post #56
Alupis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their own website is displaying/using MapCode's incorrectly. For example, they have 0C.T4 and they say it's in Ireland and appears to be some bench in the picture. However, if you use that MapCode, you will see it's the middle of some river in Amsterdam. 0C.T4 == 52.369764, 4.868898 Another: 81.J4W They seem to claim it's in Alaska, appears to be some road. However, it's another river in Amsterdam. 81.J4W == 52.50895…

Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results. I'll cite a .doc file here, it's also available on the Developers page: > 1. Codes only need to be accurate enough for public, every-day use. At the human scale, when you are within a few meters of a destination, you are “there”. > 4. Peop…

Any reference to how they came up with any given Map Code? Like how 52.508957, 4.769173 became US-AK 81.J4W?

I see they have come up with them for all locations, but how can I take a given coordinate and surmise it's MapCode, or the reverse (without their API or website)?

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#62

Post by [deleted] »

codeduck wrote: post #7

Mapcodes are a free, open way to make every house or location on Earth addressable by a short code. With nothing else except your mapcode, for instance, a navigation system will bring someone to within meters of your front door. So what happens if you live in a multi-story block of flats?

[deleted]

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#64

Post by lstamour »

paul_f wrote: post #52

What problem does this solve, exactly?

From their reference doc:

> The mapcode system was revived and worked out in 2006 when TomTom decided to expand their operations to countries like India and China. It was difficult to sell navigation devices in these countries, among other things because a significant part of the population lives without address, lacking not just house numbers but often even street names, which often made it hard or even impossible to enter a destination. It was thought that the introduction of a simple and ubiquitous system for representing locations (and hence destinations) would in due time make navigation devices as welcome there as anywhere else.

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#65

Post by ff7c11 »

ekidd wrote: post #19

Overall, this looks pretty interesting, assuming your goal is to communicate physical locations with an accuracy of a couple of meters using a format that fits on a business card. It can also be used without country names, if you prefer it that way (just select "International" when generating the code.) Developer downloads here: http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V This is patented, with an IS…

They call it

  ...a free, open way to make every house ...
and then they say

  The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be
  altered in any way
not very open

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#66

Post by coder23 »

Omni5cience wrote: post #32

I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/ .

Or the artificial Swatch time, which doesn't solve anything. We already have an international time, Coordinated Universal Time. It only takes to know your offset and some basic addition to convert.

Converting longitude and latitude to some other character base, like someone suggested would be better.

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#67

Post by lstamour »

Alupis wrote: post #61
lstamour wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results. I'll cite a .doc file here, it's also available on the Developers page: > 1. Codes only need to be accurate enough for public, every-day use. At the human scale, when you are within a few meters of a destination, you are “there”. > 4. Peop…

Any reference to how they came up with any given Map Code? Like how 52.508957, 4.769173 became US-AK 81.J4W? I see they have come up with them for all locations, but how can I take a given coordinate and surmise it's MapCode, or the reverse (without their API or website)?

Goal #3 on their list was:

> A conversion need not just be based on formulae. A respectable amount of data may be used as part of an algorithm.

Which is why when you go to the downloads page, you'll find sources in C, JavaScript and Java, but they all include "data tables".

There are a few other restrictions, though it's somewhat unclear how relevant they are here without inspecting the tables closer:

> One such limit is to use only rectangular areas in our definitions. Another is to limit the size of the “context” data table to about 16,000 records.

So it's not something you can do without the data tables. And for ease of use, they have disambiguation routines for country/state input.

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#68

Post by chippy »

fixermark wrote: post #63

It's unfortunate that their map-encoding solution appears to be based on TomTom's dataset, instead of Google Maps. It therefore thinks my house is my neighbor's house. Open Street Map is, sadly, no better, thinking my house is a different neighbor's house.

OpenStreetMap's better in that you can correct it yourself or leave a note for someone else to fix

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#69

Post by maxerickson »

fixermark wrote: post #63

It's unfortunate that their map-encoding solution appears to be based on TomTom's dataset, instead of Google Maps. It therefore thinks my house is my neighbor's house. Open Street Map is, sadly, no better, thinking my house is a different neighbor's house.

If OpenStreetMap being wrong really bothers you, you can fix it. I mean to point that out in an abstract sense more than I mean to implore you to do so.

As a rule, address data in OSM is very incomplete and the Nominatim instance on osm.org falls back to things like TIGER data to do geocoding. If you are in a region where there are a lot of addresses present in the OSM data, it would be great if you could at least drop a note nearby stating that the addresses in the area have problems (it's the button shaped like a cartoon word balloon, on the right hand side of the page).

(Housenumbers show up when zoomed in, if they aren't showing, then the OpenStreetMap website is showing you results based on some fallback data.)

Re: Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

#70

Post by chippy »

basicallydan wrote: post #51

No, they didn't. They "killed" parts of addresses. Also, these are still hard to remember. Personally, I'm a fan of http://what3words.com/ I'm currently here: http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent

I like what3words also.

What I'd really like is a hierarchy so that given

>lives.fend.spent

when you saw the words

>lives.fend.rabbi

you knew it was nearby, within the "fend" place or that

>lives.gopher.spoon

was within the "lives" places

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