Honestly, I want an address that follows me as I move, so I don't need to keep updating every service that sends me mail.
Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#82There is one significant problem with how Open Location Codes are being used and promoted by Google.
Try to find the following place on Bing or OpenStreetMap without using Google's services: 9MHR+PW Retkowy, Poland
The 9MHR+PW part is readily decodable, and could denote any of thousands of places around the globe. But the most significant part of the code is routinely omitted by Google, and replaced by a place name that one needs Google Maps to look up.
The question is, do we really need another way to link to Google Maps?
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#83Seems like reinventing a solid wheel with a disposable one... I'm more for Latitude and Longitude: - Latitude/Longitude have been around for a long time, established, proven reasonably reliable. - Ultimate more calculable, no need for lookup/conversion - No language issues (three words seem to be primarily English) also unless it becomes an international standard whats to stop someone making a similar service with di…
You are fortunate that lat/long is sufficient for your use-case. In my experience, the problem is that it isn't as exact as you'd think, especially when your measurement passes back and forth between reality, the idealized cartesian lat/long, and node/distance understandings of road networks. At a previous company, our map provider moved the entire United States three meters to the west and we spent the next week re-…
Yeah had that happen on google maps API a few years back where the earth adjusted southeast or something like that... I wonder if the offset you experienced was able to be re-adjusted by calculation or was the new geometry inconsistent?
Ive realized we can't ever get exact - best we can hope for is finding something that's constant enough for a long period. So far lat/lon has done best.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#84Yet 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…
Will two close-by locations eg. just a meter apart have any part of the phrase in common?
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#85I 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 a…
Just wanted to express thanks for this very insightful comment. The range of solutions visible in other posts must be ridiculously amusing (being absolute, global, western-centric, experience and culture-denying, and having properties irrelevant to local inhabitants) to anthropologists.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#86Yet 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…
Will two close-by locations eg. just a meter apart have any part of the phrase in common?
A five word phrase is roughly a 5m x 5m region, so 1m wouldn't be enough to move into the next block.
But in general yes, locations that are "close by" will share the same set of words.
The mapping itself is extremely simple. A geohash is encoded as string of alphanumeric characters where each character is in base-32. This means each character encodes 5-bits of coordinate information. To get to a 5m x 5m region you need 45-bits worth or 9 geohash characters.
To map this 9 character geohash to a phrase is simple - we simply use the binary representation of the characters as a numeric index into a fixed dictionary of words. The first character is mapped to a word in a dictionary containing 32 entries. After that we map characters in pairs to dictionaries of 1024 words; 2 geohash characters being 5-bits we get a 10-bit index.
So two geohashes that share the same prefix will also share the same words, modulo our grouping scheme.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#87Some alternatives that I am aware of: https://wikimili.com/en/Natural_Area_Code , https://what3words.com/ , https://geokey.io/ , http://geohash.org/ , https://www.mapcode.com/ . Some of which are proprietary. Edit: plus.codes was this same proposal. Removed from the list.
I just got more and more frustrated reading the README because I kept thinking this has already been done brilliantly and in multiple languages. It’s called What3Words.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#88Seems like reinventing a solid wheel with a disposable one... I'm more for Latitude and Longitude: - Latitude/Longitude have been around for a long time, established, proven reasonably reliable. - Ultimate more calculable, no need for lookup/conversion - No language issues (three words seem to be primarily English) also unless it becomes an international standard whats to stop someone making a similar service with di…
I agree, however this and latitude longitude don't fully solve the problem the post discusses. Just because you know where the entrance is, it doesn't describe how to get there. Maybe the area isn't available on mapping services (not that uncommon for small communities, even in Western countries) or maybe you need to take a specific route to get there.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#89Some alternatives that I am aware of: https://wikimili.com/en/Natural_Area_Code , https://what3words.com/ , https://geokey.io/ , http://geohash.org/ , https://www.mapcode.com/ . Some of which are proprietary. Edit: plus.codes was this same proposal. Removed from the list.
I just got more and more frustrated reading the README because I kept thinking this has already been done brilliantly and in multiple languages. It’s called What3Words.
No. W3w is not open and not brilliant precisely because it exists in multiple languages.
Re: Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses
#90No one has mentioned H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index.