Hi Doug, Have you seen this project?
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/06/missing-maps-human-genome-project-unmapped-cities?CMP=twt_gu The work you are doing could tie nicely in with what they are trying to achieve? Regards, Paul Naylor Cartographic Design Consultant Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive, SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, SO16 0AS Phone: +44 (0) 23 8005 5143 www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk<http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/> | [email protected] Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email. From: Geowanking [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Doug Rinckes Sent: 29 October 2014 13:53 To: [email protected] Subject: [Geowanking] Location address codes Hello geowankers I'm an engineer at Google, and I have just open sourced a geo project we've been working on for a while. I used to work on our maps, detecting missing road networks and in my spare time mapping roads in Papua New Guinea, Central and West Africa from the satellite imagery. But without street names or addresses, a road network isn't all that useful. People can't use it for directions, because they can't express where they want directions to. After talking with colleagues from around the world, I discovered that's it actually very common for streets to be unnamed. That means that we can't get the names from government agencies, streetview or user edits - because there are no names to get. We thought that we should provide short codes that could be used like addresses, to give the location of homes, businesses, anything. If we made them usable from smartphones, we can make addresses for anywhere available to anyone with a smartphone pretty much immediately. We had some specific requirements, including that these address codes should work offline, they shouldn't spell words or include easily confused characters. We wanted to be able to look at two codes and tell if they are near each other, and estimate the direction and even the distance. The codes should not be generated by a single provider, because what do you do when they disappear? Finally, it had to be open sourced. Open sourcing the project was important. We wanted to allow everyone to evaluate it so that we don't go implementing something that turns out to not be useful. If it does turn out to be useful, everyone (including other mapping providers) should be able to implement it and use the codes freely. I'm pre-announcing this to a couple of geo lists today, and I'll be sticking around for comments and questions. The following links provide more information: Github project: https://github.com/google/open-location-code Demonstration website: http://plus.codes Discussion list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code Enjoy! Doug This email is only intended for the person to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email which must not be copied, distributed or disclosed to any other person. Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are personal to the writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance Survey. Nor can any contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's behalf via email. We reserve the right to monitor emails and attachments without prior notice. Thank you for your cooperation. Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive Southampton SO16 0AS Tel: 03456 050505 http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
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