Similar in practice to MGRS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system
-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=- Eric B. Wolf 720-334-7734 On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Steve Coast <st...@asklater.com> wrote: > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > Geowanking@geowanking.org > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > >
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