One of the apparent selling points is Plus Codes work offline. While that is true for full codes, the short codes its a bit more fuzzy, as will need a Gazetteer to resolve (or even lookup) placenames.
Has anyone thought of creating a 'minimal' gazetteer for use offline? In theory for creating short codes, *could *just find a place near the center of the grid created by 4 figure area codes (as the place name in effect replaces those first 4 (or 2!) figures ) - but while it would produce a technically functional Plus Code (it can be resolved), it might be using a not very recognisable place (there may be a closer town that makes more 'sense' to users).* For resolving short codes, its much harder, as may need a much more comprehensive list, as don't know what gazetteer the creator may of used. But in theory even so the usable placenames I think would still form a rough grid. Many place names may well be unused as they too close to 'grid boundary' for example. Furthermore, may not need to store the full resolution lat/long, eg maybe just two decimal places would be enough. But even more interestingly maybe could just use Plus Codes to encode the location in the gazetteer (eg just storing the first 4 figures of the Plus Code? although for better encoding might use 6 for example) Guess would never be able to build a 100% reliable dataset for decoding, as even https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Guidance-for-shortening-codes says, could be creating a short code with a River or a mountain name, ... but could perhaps build a reasonable dataset, that covers most areas? ---- * eg "5R4R+H3 Uxbridge, UK" is technically resolvable. But its a code for Gatwick Airport, which Uxbridge doesn't make sense. Uxbridge, just chosen as roughly central to 9C3X0000+ -- Public site: http://www.openlocationcode.com/ Github project: https://github.com/google/open-location-code Demo site: http://plus.codes/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Plus Codes Community Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-location-code+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to open-location-code@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/open-location-code. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-location-code/7a45fba1-840e-4fd8-84b1-0af159496499%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
