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Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

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Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#71

Post by theelous3 »

dmoo wrote: post #50
theelous3 wrote: post #16

I'll forever be mad that my country (Ireland) hired some firm to create eircode, which is a proprietary geo system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ... You can't discern the eircode for a given address, as far as I am aware, without looking it up, and lookups are limited to 10 by paywall. We paid 27m euro for what has already been solved by open source, and for some reason we have to conti…

If you enter the address in to google maps it will give you the eircode. The issue in Ireland is the non unique addresses in rural areas. The fact that the last 4 characters are randomly distributed means that a sequence for addresses on the same street is not something you can derive. You need to look up each in turn.

Ireland's non unique addresses aren't a problem for any of the open standards around this I've seen. Eircode is unnecessary. Using one of these geo location centric systems also means no central system is required to add new ones etc.

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#72

Post by Tomte »

rkangel wrote: post #69
Tomte wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that. But why do you insist that a location code stays the same? The location has really changed. Plus codes are not street addresses.

> Plus codes are not street addresses. One of the main use cases for plus codes is to be a street address in places for which street addresses are challenging. To put it another way - we almost always use co-ordinates to help us find a particular physical object (peak of mountain, end of runway, house on street). Co-ordinates that shift with tectonic movement are most useful for that.

When an earthquake has shifted a house a meter to the right, the plus code is (a) still good enough and (b) doesn't matter because there is not much of a house left to "locate".

I'd even argue that especially in those catastrophic scenarios, location (as in GPS coordinates) is still more important than addresses that depend on physical features (like a street) that may simply be gone.

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#73

Post by notatoad »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #24
oquidave wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why these technologies never get mass adoption; so many solutions duplicating themselves trying to solve the same thing. Fact is, most users would care less about numerous implementation, they need to be educated just one solution which works fine. Personally I find plus.codes from Google user-friendly. They are already integrated in Google Maps which has over 1 billion downloads. They are free and opensource…

Where do I find them in Google maps? what is the plus.code for the Eiffel tower? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eiffel+Tower,+Paris,+Franc...

The eiffel tower search result is the whole park, which is larger than the area spanned by a single plus code and therefore does not display it's plus code.

picking a smaller location displays the plus code, for example https://imgur.com/0YoSuWz

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#74

Post by [deleted] »

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I think a more accurate description is "Open Source Lat/Long Alternative". Addresses, at least in my part of the world, work relatively well for telling a person where you are, given some knowledge of the town. I can tell someone "College between Drake and Prospect" and they can picture it in their head. Sure, it requires some level of knowledge of the town, but no level of knowledge of the town is going to make "HW8…

[deleted]

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#75

Post by logfromblammo »

Reinventing UTM/MGRS again, I see.

The major problem with these as addressing standards, and with open location code, is that most people do not live or receive mail at a fixed location in the middle of the ocean. Most location codes encode an empty quadrilateral of ocean.

Addressing with efficient encoding needs to be dense in cities, and sparse in uninhabited wilderness.

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#77

Post by thelittlenag »

Yet another alternative is GeohashPhrase (https://www.qalocate.com/resources/) which is a simple and direct mapping of word tuples to geohashes.

The word tuples are intentionally structured so they can form a phrase. The exact phrase is left up to the person, with the only constraint being that that phrase use all the base words.

And because of how word choice is made (words that map different parts of the geohash come from disjoint dictionaries) the phrase mapping is invariant under changes in recalled word ordering, word use (noun to verb, or adjective to noun), and more.

Some advantages of the GeohashPhrase:

1) Will be open source and free (Once we finalize the dictionaries and write some real docs.).

2) Designed for offline usage.

3) Designed to be friendly to humans. Phrases and words are MUCH more friendly than alphanumeric digits.

4) Multi-language. The encoding scheme works for most languages.

5) Resilient to errors in human memory, which tends to re-order words, change pluralization, etc.

6) Easy to read, write, share, etc.

7) Directly decodes to a geohash.

8) Works with any map.

-----------------------------------------

Here is a comparison side by side of each option:

Lat/Lon : -6.7184 , 129.5080

GeohashPhrase (Raw): salute tell small student muddy

GeohashPhrase ("Encoded"): The small muddy student told me of a salute.

XADDRESS: 7150 Magical Pearl - Maluku, Indonesia

WHAT3WORDS: percolator.surmount.retooled

GEOHASH: qyu1g0by7

MAPCODE: VQ6.1MFD

OPENLOCATIONCODE: 6Q5F 7GJ5+J6

-----------------------------

(Disclosure: I work for QALocate.)

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#78

Post by thelittlenag »

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I think a more accurate description is "Open Source Lat/Long Alternative". Addresses, at least in my part of the world, work relatively well for telling a person where you are, given some knowledge of the town. I can tell someone "College between Drake and Prospect" and they can picture it in their head. Sure, it requires some level of knowledge of the town, but no level of knowledge of the town is going to make "HW8…

Unfortunately we're conflated addresses with coordinates, but fundamentally addresses are not geo-coordinates. Addresses are really just an ancient (500+ years!) short-hand for giving a person a set of rough directions to a "place", with the person supplying that last mile of figuring from context exactly where they are going. It is impressive how far we've taken this technology, but it is really starting to falter as the information age has matured.

From my perspective any solution, like this one, that tries to solve the problem of addresses through the lens of coordinates is doomed to failure. The reason is that there are just too many use cases that raw coordinates cannot supply context for.

For example when I ask for directions to a restaurant, the context of who I am and what my relation to the restaurant is matters quite a lot. A set of coordinates handed out uniformly to all who ask does nothing for my particular use case. Plumbers, health inspectors, and delivery drivers don't use the same entrance, or parking, as ride share or pedestrians.

I think it would be more productive to move to a system that is capable of capturing and relaying these kinds of relations, or at least taking as them as input. Better geo-coordinates miss the forest for the trees.

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#79

Post by thelittlenag »

MayeulC wrote: post #59

A good explanation of this against competing standards seems to be available here [1]. It seems weird that they complain about discontinuities in such a system, where there has to be some discontinuities in a tiled system. Now, could this be used as an alternative to DNS? have a registrar per tile, and delegate if necessary. I wish this could be used as a geo: URL, or as a location field in my ical invites. I guess I…

Alternative to DNS you say? Like a Location Name System!?!

Well, we're building it! I cannot supply much info right now other than the whitepaper at https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ but I'm really hopeful that we'll have a beta out in the next few months.

Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

#80

Post by thelittlenag »

logfromblammo wrote: post #75

Reinventing UTM/MGRS again, I see. The major problem with these as addressing standards, and with open location code, is that most people do not live or receive mail at a fixed location in the middle of the ocean. Most location codes encode an empty quadrilateral of ocean. Addressing with efficient encoding needs to be dense in cities, and sparse in uninhabited wilderness.

Doing this saves you about two bits worth of information while usually greatly increasing complexity.

To see why consider how geohashes work. As you add letters you telescope in to a more precise region. The land/water distinction is less information than even what is encoded by the very first character of your 9 or 10 character geohash.

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