Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses

Skimming through the docs, even though warts of postal addressing are mentioned, this seems like a (base-14?) encoding of geocodes rather than unified hierarchical postal addressing (which is still an accomplishment, and something I can see a need for). Though this seems to work for latin scripts only I guess.

For actually representing global postal addressing schemes with all warts and historic practices, I know no better standard than UPU S-1. I had a project for (partially) implementing it for a large logistics provider ten years ago. It was one of the few cases where using XML for business data genuinely made sense, as addresses could be represented in a line-oriented format (as you'd write on a postal piece) and at the same time structured info in the address (postcodes, streets, house numbering tokens) could be tagged for extraction, validation, etc. Though to make end-of-line chars significant in XML (which we had to somehow because postcodes are often placed at the begin or end of a line in formal addresses) we had to represent addresses basically as address_line_1, adress_line_2, etc. SGML could've handled this much more elegantly, as not only can it assign meaning to line breaks via short references, it also (theoretically) allows representation of overlapping (concurrent) tagging structures for two or more vocabularies.

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

#7

Post by LoSboccacc » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 9:50 AM UTC

there's something I don't understand, not coming from a mapping background: sixth decimal place of latitude/longitude is already down to about 10cm precision, so using two 8:24 fixed point would give you comparable precision with half the encoding length than this format (using two fixed points dword encoded straight in base 32). why these encoding prefer to use space partitioning more than encoded coordinates?

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

#8

Post by pauly » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

Gys wrote: post #4

I wish Google to put a tiny bit of their money [0] into promoting this more. To counter the closed-source, for-profit what3words offering. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20749831/alphabet-google-a...

what3words has appeared twice recently as a news story on bbc.co.uk I'd not heard of plus.codes even though now I realise I'd seen them on google maps listings

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

#9

Post by new_here » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

These codes could benefit from some sort of distinct prefix so that users, browsers and apps could identify it as an open location code and treat it as such apart from a random string. Other examples being things like @username or #hashtag.

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

#10

Post by jstewartmobile » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

I think triangles would have made more sense.