2014-10-29 14:29 GMT+00:00 David Blackman <[email protected]>: > Remind me a bit of http://what3words.com/ > > yes, defintiely tries to address a similar problem.
I'm a very minor investor in what3words Biggest immediate difference I can see is w3w belives words are key for usability. Consumers know words. It's difficult for consumers to use long strings of letters and numbers, especially if those letters are in an alphabet (ie latin characters) they might not know (w3w is available in many languages). Words also greatly simplify voice recognition. > On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:53 AM, 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 >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > >
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