The interesting thing about w3w is they have funding. The world already has lots of location code systems, the problem is that nobody uses them. Maybe funding will help.
This Google system I'm sure is mathematically elegant but it looks like google isn't actually using it. Being open source isn't enough, if it was open and used across google then it'd be a de facto standard. Steve > On Oct 29, 2014, at 3:29 PM, David Blackman <black...@foursquare.com> wrote: > > Remind me a bit of http://what3words.com/ > >> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Doug Rinckes <drinc...@google.com> 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 >> Geowanking@geowanking.org >> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >> > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > Geowanking@geowanking.org > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
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