+1. Problem with most of these alternative systems is that they try to be more human-readable and usable, but they are not - just plain old lat-lon is more universal, human-understandable, compatible, works offline and online with any software etc. It only takes a few more chars to write it down, but this is becomes less and less of a problem in the world of QR codes, image recognition, big storages and wireless bandwidths. My bet would be that none of the lat-long replacements would find acceptance anywhere near actual lat-long.
But a semantically meaningful addressing system for noname roads may be useful in many cases indeed. This needs local cultural study on each of your target country, not that much mathematics. I know in many countries without street names they use local landmarks, business, sometimes house or even person names to point streets and addresses. These names are not clear or consistent (roads have many alternative names, similar names for different roads etc), but as long as locals know the landmarks then most alternatives make sense for them. As long as you have the landmarks mapped you should be able to computer-generate sensible names for the roads, so you might end up with chatty and fuzzy, but meaningful local addresses like “paved road from beach to bus station, 200 m, left”. Funny thing with such addresses is that they work even long after some landmarks have disappeared from the wild. I’ve seen in some major mapping provider that they have auto-labeled some rural roads using closest farm names. This is not from official address system (and there are no official names), but much better than no names at all. It seems they have removed this by now unfortunately. Jaak On 29 Oct 2014, at 15:32, josh@oklieb <[email protected]> wrote: > Doug, > > Very interesting work, but there always seems to be a fundamental > misconception about addresses. Addresses are not just positions, but carry > the implication of directions, of a means for traveling to or directing > others to a location. If a position encoding does not carry the implication > that, yes, this location is at this position on this side of a street that > one can travel on, then it’s just another shorthand for a lat-lon coordinate > position. Useful for flying to in Google Earth, but not for physical commerce > where which side of a protected rail line a position falls on will be vitally > important for access and travel time even when street network routing is > available. This affects “closeness” as well, since a few feet apart and 20 > minutes out of the way by roads or paths is not “close” in many useful senses. > > Now, just because a street doesn’t have a name, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still > exist and have an identity. In fact, using a position as an address is > already presuming some fairly complete streets data and routing capabilities. > Leveraging streets and identifiers for streets (hmmm, how about OSM id’s) > could result in position encodings which function for people much more like > addresses, and would be considerably more likely to be adopted. > > Food for thought… > > -Josh Lieberman > > On Oct 29, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Doug Rinckes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> That's going to depend on the reaction we get. :-) >> >> There's two main reasons that we're holding off. We don't want to implement >> a feature that nobody uses, because it's much harder to remove a feature >> than it is to add it. Secondly, although we've had a lot of engineers >> looking at this, we want to get feedback from outside our group, so that if >> there is a bug or a weakness that really impacts the usability, we get a >> chance to fix things first. >> >> If everyone shrugs and says meh, maybe never. If the reaction is "looks >> good, turn it on, we'll use it", then we get to schedule the work. >> >> >> >> Doug >> >> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Doug Rinckes <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi Barry, >> >> MGRS as far as I recall doesn't truncate elegantly. We looked at MGRS-New, >> which from my notes has the format GZD GZD SQ SQ E E E E E N N N N N, so if >> you start chopping characters off the end, you just affect the northing. >> >> But your comment about the xkcd cartoon is good and something we spent a lot >> of time arguing about. But as an old manager of mine once said "the good >> thing about open standards is there are so many to choose from". :-) >> >> >> Doug >> >> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Barry Hunter <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> 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 - >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
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