Interesting. Particully like https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/comparison.adoc
shows have looked into the existing systems. Ref: http://xkcd.com/927/ :) I do notice dont include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system in many ways does something very similar. It's encoding UTM, rather than lat/long, but algorithms are freely available. Not saying its a good solution, but would be interesting to know why it wasn't considered. On 29 October 2014 13:53, Doug Rinckes <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > > -- Barry - www.nearby.org.uk - www.geograph.org.uk -
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