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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

#71

Post by coin »

sinak wrote: post #39

The TomTom founders definitely didn't "just kill the postcode." > Mapcodes were developed in 2001 by Pieter Geelen and Harold Goddijn, soon after the GPS satellite signals were opened up for civilian use. It was decided to donate the mapcode system to the public domain in 2008. Can we get an update to the click-baity title?

GPS was always available for civilian use since day one. Perhaps they meant when GPS's Selective Availability (degregration of accuracy civilians) was turned off, which was in 2000.

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

#73

Post by jib »

jxf wrote: post #22

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…

Yep. Swedish post codes define mail delivery areas as well.

You can effectively sort on partials and get high accuracy.

For instance, the office I used to work in handled all of 421xx, 426xx and 436xx, as well as a few of the 430xx range.

Sorting was done by bucket sort (literally) on the top 3 digits in a central distribution location (all 5 for those like 430xx that was handled out of several offices), then distribution to each mail office, then another bucket sort on the full five digits, followed by another bucket sort on (roughly) street address, followed by a final sort on route.

This appears to lose all of that functionality.

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

#74

Post by Alupis »

lstamour wrote: post #67
Alupis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limi…

Hmm, I just took a look at their Java SDK... (clearly just sample code, but intended for embedding into your project to get going quickly)

They make a lot of assumptions, and a lot of hard-coded values.

For example, they seem to have lots of city names and country names hard-coded into a giant String array. ISO country codes are hard-coded (probably a safe assumption so-long as new countries are not added), many "magic numbers".

Overall, I think these things are acceptable... but I don't necessarily like relying on the assumptions that "things today should be the same tomorrow". With plain old coordinates, my software would never care if the ISO added new country codes or what-have-you.

I see they intent this to be mainly for human consumption -- but is US-AK 81.J4W really any more memorable than 52.508957, 4.769173? I'd probably end up writing both down personally, which means the coordinates would suit me just fine.

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

#75

Post by easytiger »

maxerickson wrote: post #69
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 dr…

Bearing in mind that google paid people to sit at a desk adjusting house addresses to point at actual houses correctly before they recently invented their machine learning brain thing

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

#76

Post by fixermark »

chippy wrote: post #68
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

That's possible with Google Maps also (http://www.google.com/mapmaker)

But thank you for noting that I can do the same with OSM. After making an account and logging in, I've created a feature-point for my address, but I don't see a way to correct or suppress the incorrect information from OpenStreetMap Nominatim. shrug Problem for another day.

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

#77

Post by fixermark »

maxerickson wrote: post #69
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 dr…

Done. Thank you for the tip.

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

#78

Post by maxerickson »

easytiger wrote: post #75
maxerickson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

Bearing in mind that google paid people to sit at a desk adjusting house addresses to point at actual houses correctly before they recently invented their machine learning brain thing

Maybe in many places. Or maybe for some uses. Around here, Google Maps has a block level understanding of addresses and just shows a calculated point for a given house number (you can feed in non houses and it shows them down the street from real addresses).

My understanding is that they have acquired building data from many municipalities and will absolutely use that when they have it, not that they have spent a lot of time refining it.

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

#79

Post by 6d0debc071 »

jxf wrote: post #22

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…

From the Mapcode System Reference Document:

http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html

'Unfortunately, a large part of the world population has no address. In India alone, well over half a billion people live in houses that have no street name. Millions of man-hours are lost every day trying to locate or deliver goods to people and businesses based on business cards like this:

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

Amri Patel, consultant New Sun Technologies, District 14, Pune Tel. +23984982217

Three miles east along the airport road, take second left past the golden statue, in the fourth street left ask final directions at baker across from white house.

Figure 1. Typical Indian Business Card

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

As we all know, even having an address is only an initial step in locating a position. Knowing someone lives on Queens’ Road 123 in Brunnock still requires you to find out where Brunnock is, and where the Queen’s Road is, and where number 123 is.

The mapcode system was designed as a free, brand-less, international standard that allows any location on the surface of the Earth to be represented by a short, easy to recognize and remember “code”, usually consisting of between 4 and 7 letters and digits.'

So, your point number 2 seems closest to what they're aiming for. Indeed, later in the document, they state:

'The longer a code gets, the more awkward it becomes to use, the more difficult to remember, the more easy to make mistakes in copying or using, the less benefit it offers over more elaborate descriptions. Many other benefits depend on mapcodes being short. If length was not a problem, we might as well put our longitude and latitude on business cards and address labels.'

> Also, won't there be multiple mapcodes for a single spot and won't that require cross-association of the respective metadata?

It seems like this corresponds to a coordinate system. You say what country you're in and then this gives you an aim point. I don't think you need to say 'it's in This, which is in This which...' :/

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

#80

Post by hnha »

chippy wrote: post #70
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

Sounds like usa.newyork.brooklyn would be a smart extension. Quick, let me patent it and trademark the term "3 or more words that describe a location in hierarchical order". Or maybe I will just call it "backwaddress". :P
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