What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
theguardian.com
What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#2I used to find funny that my old school What3words was stress.cheat.mixture[0]. I guess that represents the feeling of studying Telecom Engineering quite right.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#3What3words is a proprietary licensed database that should be public/free.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#4I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words (https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason.
Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half of them would require a dictionary for a native speaker, making the address system useless.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#5> “When someone asked where you lived, it would be like trying to remember your wifi router password.” That’s when this idea of three words came up. A bit of maths proved it was possible. “With 40,000 recognisable dictionary words, you have 64tn combinations, and there are 57tn squares.”
Sounds like Diceware.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#6This is an advertorial - paid for by W3W.
> Tim Adams travelled to South Africa as a guest of what3words and Gateway Health
In reality, they have a closed, proprietary algorithm. They charge for usage. They are the sole arbiters of what goes on there. They have weak internationalisation.
Hell of a PR team though.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#7The problem with this approach is of course language limitations.
Can we bypass this with a combination of numbers and universal symbols?
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#8I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words ( https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875 ) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason. Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half…
Note the simple words are assigned to populated areas. In the ocean it might give you "overripe.thoroughbreds.salads".
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#9I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words ( https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875 ) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason. Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half…
Moreover it is absolutely not locality sensitive, rendering the whole system into a proprietary hashing algorithm. Probably the localization is pretty much the only element I agree to be good to have, but I believe it's likely that some word pairs are in the same synset for some languages, even though I'm not really in a position to evaluate its wordlists.
Re: What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere
#10I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words ( https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875 ) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason. Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half…
Note the simple words are assigned to populated areas. In the ocean it might give you "overripe.thoroughbreds.salads".
In French, on their map demo which centers the map in Paris, it's already pretty bad. I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean.
Edit: A few examples taken randomly of mostly unused words in French (require a dictionary for a good 90% of native speakers): Volute, redise, dépiler, rapière, ânier, putatif, toison. All of that is in the center of Paris, and it took me 5 mins to find them, there's probably hundreds of rare words.