Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Brad, Richard, Thanks for your comments. The comparison doc gives is based on the systems that we looked at, around the beginning of 2014. A better place for an up-to-date comparison or list of geocode systems would be a wikipedia page. I don't think we need a list of reference locations. If it's a list with locations, then it has to be distributed in various languages, it has to be free to use, and I don't want to have to ship data files around because that's just awful. I think that people will end up picking stuff that works and that it won't be that hard. With OLC codes you don't have to be very close to the reference (within 50km is enough), so if you live in a slum area such as Kibera or Dharavi, you can use the nearest city as your reference (Nairobi or Mumbai) and it will work. Doug On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 2:10 AM, Brad Hards br...@frogmouth.net wrote: On Wed, 29 Oct 2014 02:53:22 PM Doug Rinckes wrote: 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. I think its an interesting idea. A couple of questions / comments: - Its slightly more efficient than GARS (30minutes by 30 minutes is only 6 char, as opposed to 7 in GARS), and the extensibility is interesting. Against that, GARS only uses two chars which pretty much avoids the nasty word problem that you could still face despite all the work to avoid it. Perhaps GARS could be added to the comparison page. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Area_Reference_System] - Have you looked for cases where the shortened (local) version is ambiguous with a larger area? I appreciate that this is supposed to be context dependent, but machines sometimes guess wrong about context that is obvious to humans. - Do you plan to produce a list of all valid reference locations? For offline / database purposes, it would be useful to show the user a canonical list, or to be able to provide the shortened version with the expected number of characters (e.g. 4 or 6) stripped off the front. Brad ___ 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Hi Josh, Sure, this is pretty much a shorthand for lat/lng with some interesting properties. I wanted something that would work without depending on Google or OSM or anyone to have mapped the area, so didn't want to rely on id's from anyone. It should work for places that aren't even near roads, and maybe not even on land! If someone is using a code in a situation such as you mention, if it really is vitally important that you know which side of the street or rail line it's on, then they can say +2GFWJV Mombasa. North side. It's the same way that I expect people in multi-storey buildings will provide the floor or room number. But if they don't, then it either won't matter, or it will still be better than trying to follow instructions like left just before Mazeras, over the railway line, second left through the gate, left at the fork, left around the storage tanks, then through the fence,left along the fence line, and ask anyone you see for me. :-) Doug On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 4:32 PM, josh@oklieb j...@oklieb.net 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 drinc...@google.com 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 drinc...@google.com 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 ba...@barryhunter.co.uk 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 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
[Geowanking] Location address codes
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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Hi Paul, Yes, that would be very nice indeed. Reading the article, I'm not sure what they're going to do when the streets really aren't named, or when you need to specify a location that isn't near a street. There's a mention of mapping landmarks but those are tough to geocode and search for. (I sit near our geocoding team who have been working on landmark-based addressing for various parts of the world.) Their wiki page mentions a launch party in London in November, but there's no other information. Do you know if it's going ahead? Anyone on this list? Doug On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Paul Naylor paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk wrote: Hi Doug, Have you seen this project? http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/06/missing-maps-human-genome-project-unmapped-cities?CMP=twt_gu The work you are doing could tie nicely in with what they are trying to achieve? Regards, *Paul Naylor* *Cartographic Design Consultant* *Ordnance Survey* Adanac Drive, SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, SO16 0AS Phone: +44 (0) 23 8005 5143 www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk | paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk *Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email.* *From:* Geowanking [mailto:geowanking-boun...@geowanking.org] *On Behalf Of *Doug Rinckes *Sent:* 29 October 2014 13:53 *To:* geowanking@geowanking.org *Subject:* [Geowanking] Location address codes 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 This email is only intended for the person to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email which must not be copied, distributed or disclosed to any other person. Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are personal to the writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance Survey. Nor can any contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's behalf via email. We reserve the right to monitor emails and attachments without prior notice. Thank you for your cooperation. Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive Southampton SO16 0AS Tel: 03456 050505 http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk ___ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@geowanking.org http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Hi Doug, Currently, it looks like they are asking people to email this address: cit...@theguardian.commailto:cit...@theguardian.com I think they’re trying to gauge interest and the skills people have to offer. Paul Naylor Cartographic Design Consultant Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive, SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, SO16 0AS Phone: +44 (0) 23 8005 5143 www.ordnancesurvey.co.ukhttp://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ | paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email. From: Doug Rinckes [mailto:drinc...@google.com] Sent: 29 October 2014 14:24 To: Paul Naylor Cc: geowanking@geowanking.org Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes Hi Paul, Yes, that would be very nice indeed. Reading the article, I'm not sure what they're going to do when the streets really aren't named, or when you need to specify a location that isn't near a street. There's a mention of mapping landmarks but those are tough to geocode and search for. (I sit near our geocoding team who have been working on landmark-based addressing for various parts of the world.) Their wiki page mentions a launch party in London in November, but there's no other information. Do you know if it's going ahead? Anyone on this list? Doug On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Paul Naylor paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.ukmailto:paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk wrote: Hi Doug, Have you seen this project? http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/06/missing-maps-human-genome-project-unmapped-cities?CMP=twt_gu The work you are doing could tie nicely in with what they are trying to achieve? Regards, Paul Naylor Cartographic Design Consultant Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive, SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, SO16 0AS Phone: +44 (0) 23 8005 5143tel:%2B44%20%280%29%2023%208005%C2%A05143 www.ordnancesurvey.co.ukhttp://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ | paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.ukmailto:paul.nay...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email. From: Geowanking [mailto:geowanking-boun...@geowanking.orgmailto:geowanking-boun...@geowanking.org] On Behalf Of Doug Rinckes Sent: 29 October 2014 13:53 To: geowanking@geowanking.orgmailto:geowanking@geowanking.org Subject: [Geowanking] Location address codes 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 This email is only intended for the person to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email which must not be copied, distributed or disclosed to any other person. Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are personal to the writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance Survey. Nor can any contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's behalf via email. We reserve the right to monitor emails and attachments without prior notice. Thank you for your cooperation. Ordnance Survey Adanac
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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 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 -- Barry - www.nearby.org.uk - www.geograph.org.uk - ___ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@geowanking.org http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
2014-10-29 14:29 GMT+00:00 David Blackman black...@foursquare.com: 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 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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 ___ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@geowanking.org http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Hi Steve, The reasons we've open sourced it before implementing it are that we didn't want to end up having to support something that only 10 people use. We also didn't want to rely on the fact it worked on Google maps - we want it to be used if it's good, not just because of who it came from. TBH, if someone else supports it before Google maps does, I'd be stoked! Doug On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:36 PM, 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
When will it ship on google? Steve On Oct 29, 2014, at 3:47 PM, Doug Rinckes drinc...@google.com wrote: Hi Steve, The reasons we've open sourced it before implementing it are that we didn't want to end up having to support something that only 10 people use. We also didn't want to rely on the fact it worked on Google maps - we want it to be used if it's good, not just because of who it came from. TBH, if someone else supports it before Google maps does, I'd be stoked! Doug On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:36 PM, 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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 ba...@barryhunter.co.uk 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 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 -- Barry - www.nearby.org.uk - www.geograph.org.uk - ___ 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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 drinc...@google.com 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 ba...@barryhunter.co.uk 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 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 -- Barry - www.nearby.org.uk - www.geograph.org.uk - ___ 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
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 drinc...@google.com 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 drinc...@google.com 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 ba...@barryhunter.co.uk 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 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
+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 j...@oklieb.net 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 drinc...@google.com 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 drinc...@google.com 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 ba...@barryhunter.co.uk 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
Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
Hi Doug,
We have proposed a system in the past that has similiarities to your open
code. we called it Geotude.
We proposed an application for a global postal code and named it posttude
http://www.posttude.com/
We presented a paper in Washington at a Geocoding Symposium in October 2011
that talks about standards.
http://www.slideshare.net/razlan/25-oct-2011-geocoding-symposium-washington-0950-richard-abas-39410602
We worked with Pos Malaysia and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia
Commission on a pilot test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD2vJsCRe4Ylist=PL81JmeKjbTXcd7_j5zo8joTSqYBjKo9Wzindex=1
We would be grateful if we could be included in your comparisons of other
systems.
Thank you
kind regards
richard abas
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:53 PM, 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.
{snip}
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Re: [Geowanking] Location address codes
On Wed, 29 Oct 2014 02:53:22 PM Doug Rinckes wrote: 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. I think its an interesting idea. A couple of questions / comments: - Its slightly more efficient than GARS (30minutes by 30 minutes is only 6 char, as opposed to 7 in GARS), and the extensibility is interesting. Against that, GARS only uses two chars which pretty much avoids the nasty word problem that you could still face despite all the work to avoid it. Perhaps GARS could be added to the comparison page. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Area_Reference_System] - Have you looked for cases where the shortened (local) version is ambiguous with a larger area? I appreciate that this is supposed to be context dependent, but machines sometimes guess wrong about context that is obvious to humans. - Do you plan to produce a list of all valid reference locations? For offline / database purposes, it would be useful to show the user a canonical list, or to be able to provide the shortened version with the expected number of characters (e.g. 4 or 6) stripped off the front. Brad ___ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@geowanking.org http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
