If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.
Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?
From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia.
I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question.
I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.
In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.
Thanks for the info.
* Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them.
* Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address
In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!)
(maybe even for different kinds of data-packets)
* Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT
you first have to authenticate as a legal entity
(person or registered organization / business)
that authentication data is hard coded on to the envelope.
If you can extrapolate positioning deltas from the coordinates themselves, then you don't need to hit the API as much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing.
It explains how to easily search for "points no more than X km from Y" in a DB query without having to actually calculate distances.
I think the advantage of lat/lon boils down to the fact that everyone knows 79.999 is close to 80.000, even though they look quite different as raw text.
A tiny change in your coordinate will mean a tiny change in your physical position, but a tiny change in your physical position will almost always mean a quite large (and basically not predictable without doing an involved calculation) change in your coordinate.
And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about.
It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three words, but the mistake will be readily obvious if you know the general location.
I shared your scepticism until I tried the app. The auto-complete is really slick and it just works. For sending coordinates through a human/speech interface it is just going to be more reliable. For ever other problem use another solution.
Same thing is true for words, there are words in my native portuguese that are dificult to tell from each other even in person, imagine by phone. If some one misunderstands a word and it's valid on a combination?
For example (in portuguese), Paca.Tatu.Cotia (Paca.Armadilo.Agouti in english) can be misheard as Maca.Tatu.Quati (Stretcher.Armadilo.Coati in english). What if both combinations are valid, but thousands of km away ?
This already presupposes that the parties involved in the communication are using smartphones, so why not send the coordinates over SMS, email or any other available messaging system?
I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP.
So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name.
Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs? There is a free tier that are an open-source list of names for the entire globe, but companies could pay to have names like "free.tacos.here" point to their locations.
No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not.
IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic.
Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have suggested replacing alphanumeric onion names with something like W3W.
You've also (inadvertently) pointed out that there's redundancy in written numbers.
Equivalent redundancy with W3W would require remembering spellings rather than a simple rule.
That is the darkest most evil sentiment to any product manager. It basically says a person cannot form an independent opinion and looks to their neighbor to derive credibility. If enough people think that way new ideas never enter the market. This is the opposite of merit.
I mean, if I buy a hammer, I couldn't care less whether anyone else uses it. Its utility is entirely decoupled from the amount of users. In this case, you're not buying into a hammer, because utility is dependent on the number of users. If "//cat.dog.goose" means nothing to anyone around me, I can't use it to communicate a location to anyone around me.
Maybe it shouldn't just be taken as "the darkest most evil sentiment" but as the general reaction consumers will have to products or services where utility is a function of adoption. With any luck, some few people will insist on using it and kickstart more widespread adoption, but that's just it: luck.
Although it's not a limitation of the coordinate system, so improving GPS accuracy to mm level resolution will make GPS coordinates obvious
Oh yea house aren't that small but the vertical distance between the floors and individual apartment in the building is.
>Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?
It's literally a con job designed to create a middleman where one isn't needed. It's the modern libertarian dream.
There is nothing libertarian about conning people or "creating a middleman where one isn't needed." If you believe that, you have been badly misinformed.
Finland has done it, see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.digia.suomi...
I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:
•Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original.
•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.
•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear.
•Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.
•Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes.
Watch this space.
The "S2" geometry system (http://s2geometry.io/) is what Google Maps and many other large systems use. It has a small bias towards the poles in terms of some S2 cells being slightly larger than others at the extremes but the bias is pretty minimal.
Another system, Uber's H3 (https://eng.uber.com/h3/), handles this problem in an even better way, although it loses some of the benefits of S2, such as having fine-grained cells no longer exactly fitting into their parent cells. It has other benefits however.
One thing missing from all of these system, including W3W, is that none of them have a height component. If I go to a party in a strange condo and need to call for an ambulance, there is a huge difference between being on the first floor and the fiftieth floor of the same building and W3W does nothing to solve this problem.
Since people appreciate height from street level differently than raw altitude, both will be accommodated in my system.
[1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696
Also don't discount the benefit of their distribution of the words. If you're using voice input and trying to get somewhere, the system can guess which of multiple inputs you mean. If you're in Louisville Kentucky you're more likely to be trying to get to "captain.water.water" (a ~90 minute drive from downtown) than "captains.water.water" (located on an island in the North Atlantic). Do you have a mechanism (maybe a check digit?) to help with that?
"captain.water.water" => ~90 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky
"captains.water.water" => island in the North Atlantic
That's crazy. I mean, "..water" should be a contiguous area. With "*.water.water" a contiguous part of it.
There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage.
Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember.
So I'm watching ;)
Want to shift a little to the east? 4CFM+JX works, but 4CFM+JY? Whoops. How about north or south? Maybe there's a way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.
How about upping the precision? The size of the square is maybe 4X the W3W grid cell, but not aware of a way for plus codes to achieve a smaller cell.
I'm not out here to bash everybody else's solutions. They're all pretty good, particularly when you limit them to particular applications. Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's.
> With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.
Topologically speaking, I am intrigued :)
If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.
Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...
"12 character code" might solve the problem from your perspective, but the point is that barcodes and IDs are annoying to read and copy by hand.
•Length-optimized. More digits = more precision, check.
•Precision optimized. Except for adding zeros, check.
•Precision-focused. Sig figs cover this.
•Logic-optimized. Adding or subtracting to lat or long respectively.
•Spheroid-optimized. I believe this applies to latitude and longitude, as well, since there's less surface area for a given coordinate space. Though, maybe it's the reverse, that it's more precise at the poles.
This is a service-related question, though, not a method-related question. There's no math equation that'll tell you your house is there when it used to be here.
Google is not exempt from this type of behavior, unfortunately.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geocoding_systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System...
The thing you are trying to design has probably already been designed.
We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.
Worse might be a little harsh, but my system:
•Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with data fidelity) for shorter strings
•Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a)
•Some of the other benefits in the original post are also missing.
You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.
Also, geohashes of many proximal points are very different (see http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 and http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq although these locations are 1 meter apart)
Also, while geohashes are great for computer storage, they are not so much for human memory.
The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize.
What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
From another W3W-criticism blog post (https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html):
“An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores.
“If you have a powerful computer in your pocket, and you want to use your brain to remember and then use your voice or a text message to share a geographic location with someone else who also has a powerful pocket computer, what3words has got you covered. If you want to infer how far that location is from another location, or which roads might connect to it, you are out of luck. Building an addressing system is difficult, expensive work specifically because legitimate addresses embed so many levels of hierarchical categories and scalar proportions for us. Remembering coordinate locations is cognitively burdensome, but the signifiers retain some meaning relative to one another. You can tell the search and rescue team that you’ve twisted your ankle at ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you’ve moved 3 meters east, you’re at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic crutch has exhausted its usefulness. Augmenting one cognitive task in a manner that debilitates the constellation of surrounding faculties is not the right way to apply technology to our problems.”
This represents my disappointment as well. When I initially heard of the system, I thought it was hierarchical; the first word describing some larger chunk, the second describing a chunk within that chunk, and the third describing the 10' x 10' block nested at the bottom. That would have been a fairly cool thing; you could easily go for less precision in order to represent a larger space -- your neighborhood, for instance. Instead, it just feels entirely non-intuitive for a system that seems to have been created to offer mnemonic names for spaces.
Perhaps there are technological limitations to the problem that I can't see that prevent a hierarchical solution from being possible or feasible. But I just see little value in an 'addressing' system where one cell's address is totally unrelated to the cells adjoining it.
edit: I've just found w3w's justifications for a non-hierarchical system on their site and they seem weak to me, but who knows, I'm no expert on the matter. -- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207768985-W...
https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
For W3W, they say:
- The codes may be pseudo-randomly generated and so nearby places may have completely different codes.
- It may be possible for multiple people to apply for codes for the same location and for different codes to be generated.
- Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.
- [It charges] money either for granting a code, for resolving codes or for allowing users to select their own short code.
- [It does] not work offline and [has] a single provider.
Plus Codes has respective advantages for each of these points, i.e., it's not proprietary; can be encoded/decoded offline; nearby places have similar codes; codes can be made longer for more accuracy; excludes easily confused characters; etc. Overall I found the article makes a convincing case for Plus Codes.
Is "angry ape alligator" right next door or in Europe? No idea. Which fire station do we relay a call to? I don't know, let's ask w3w servers (during an emergency ... )
To the precision that I want to get someone to help me when I'm trapped in a car, you really only need a few significant digits of lat/lon (.YYYY/.ZZZZ) will get you to within 1 km most of the time. The left-of-decimal numbers are not needed if you are calling local 911, as an increment there shifts by a hundred km.
EDIT: Also, given a set of lat/long coordinates, regardless of the precision, you could infer their spatial relationship as well.
A common feature of most addressing systems is being able to infer relative distance - this is usually true of even street address. (Yes, I am aware this is not always true, and yes, I am aware there are hilarious counter-examples. I don't think that changes the point.)
There's also the old country directions method - navigate by Landmarks. If your emergency services operator is familiar with the geography of their area, this becomes much easier. If you are similarly familiar, this can be very quick.
"Timmy fell down the well by the old mine on the edge of town! Good girl, Lassie."
However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around.
Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.
Latitude errors are also much easier to correct if you incorrectly memorise it but know other information (country/city). But if you find out that arbitrary.word.cat gives you an obviously incorrect location, you've got very little chance of realising that actually it must have been arbitrary.world.cats
We expect numbers to be number-like where every little digit is important. We expect words to be word-like where plurals and sometimes even synonyms mean the same or similar things.
Alternatively, try a W3W parody:
http://www.what3fucks.com (NSFW text)
Is Plus Codes a Google project or just a partnership?
No need even for the data connection. Any Android 2.3.7+ or iOS 11.3+ phone will automatically SMS the location when the emergency number is dialled.
* actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items
Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items.
I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable.
With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a helpful solution to that.
Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.
A delightful and no doubt unintentional example of a problem very similar to what you're talking about!
The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA .
The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.
The system picks very unusual names. For example STOCARDA-KRRABA-SIPLA is in Germany, but doesn't use the German name of the city. (For those wondering, Stocarda means Stuttgart in Venetian according to Wikipedia.) That makes it harder to use for locals and can hurt the feelings of people in some regions. Also using cities of other countries can cause controversial codes, especially for young and or small countries.
3geonames has to use a language for each name. This makes it hard for people who don't speak that language to pronounce the words.
The 3geonames website describes the basic principles but there's no detailed description on how to build those codes besides (a somewhat hard to read) Perl script. For example, the documentation does not explain what encoding is used exactly.
The documentation is quite sparse, I agree. I hope to find some time to deal with that also.
Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.
This other thing seems more opportunistic / financially motivated / kinda scummy too.
I also wonder about the Streisand Effect here, never heard of it until now. This almost seems like standards geek / nerd bait...
It's supposedly beneficial when trying to locate a particular person. They can just send you their W3W, the car can read it off the SMS, and automatically provide routing.
I have not used the capability, but explored it when I first got the car since I had never heard of W3W.
And why three words? You only need two, unless you're coding altitude. And damn, you already have two numbers (angles) with arbitrary precision.
And how does one calculate great-circle distances using their silly words?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely.
For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of the bay area.
Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?
Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.".
Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat.
Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"
They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: https://xn--ls8h.la/)
>Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?
That's "suspect" in the sense of "guess" (as a verb), not in the sense of a criminal suspect. (And "stocked" like a store shelf would be)
I'd call this example entirely benign.
For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.
There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.
A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless.
Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.
That, in itself, renders them hopelessly confusing.
I mean, imagine a domain name system like that. There'd be no domains and subdomains. Just a bunch of random names.
Would you mind expanding on that? This topic piqued my interest because I've recently found myself using Geohashes to lookup nearby objects and I'm wondering if there's something better that I should be doing.
I actually implemented search using simple geohashes indexed as terms back in the day. It works but this is way better.
For instance, based on advertising from the ACS (American Chemical Society, the largest scientific organization in the world by membership), you would expect they are advocates of collaboration among chemists. In reality they will sue anyone that tries to store or distribute their standard for chemical identifier numbers (CAS#).
While it might initially seem a bit easier to remember words vs numbers, W3W is a non-solution in many ways, many nicely described in the article.
Most critically, the W3W indicators have zero relation to actual geography. Adjacent locations have entirely different quasi-random identifiers -- there is no progressive gradation, and no indication whether two locations are adjacent or on different continents.
It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and their servers to navigate.
There is also no way to figure it out from known principles. The entire system has many points of failure. With a street address, I can know which way to from seeing a couple of existing addresses; W3W - no way, need a data connection.
With Lat-Long I immediately know what part of the world I'm in, and what direction I need to move to move to get closer to my target. A GPS unit, or a simple compass and map will work great. W3W -- zero clues, and need a data connection to them.
Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem.
Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.
Then instead of sending them a shortened link to something, you just put the link on your page and tell them there's a new link for them there.
That would also make it easy for students who want to go back and review older links you sent. Instead of digging through prior announcements to find the right one, they could just go to your links page.
I hope you will look at "Oh By Codes":
Standard URL shortening (although with no tracking or cookies or javascript) but you can also shorten non-urls.
There's a normal FAQ on the page, but also an "HN FAQ":
At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume. No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right?
What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)?
I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell database.
(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)
Latitude and longitude can be used without an internet connection if you can get a GPS signal.
If you're a boy scout or doomsday prepper or 1800s explorer who fell through a wormhole, and have a bit of time, you can use the sun, stars and a makeshift compass to get a good ballpark.
It's a system which only requires you and your counterpart to both accept the contract of the coordinate system.
As many others here have pointed out fuzzy.enlarged.testicles doesn't mean anything unless we both have access to W3W, and then the directions which come from me needing to get from hairy.baked.potato to you at fuzzy.enlarged.testicles uses GPS. Because giving someone a print out of all the W3W plots they need to pass through is useless, because those phrases don't mean anything, because the system isn't contiguous or addressable.
It'd be like every house on a street having a different, non-contiguous number, different name and different postal code (134 wallaby 53217 next to 5678 futon 44444). Or for the Londoners, if the postal districts didn't increase as you moved outward.
It's a bad design with too many assumptions.
Awesome.
They proposed cuteness like this:
Default Brand Name (short for "default cell server brand name"): the special brand name, such as "mercury," "venus," "earth," "moon," "mars," that denotes the default GeoRegistry for a planet. Other cell server brand names always refer to the planet Earth.
I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake.
Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their minds, I don't get it?
It's not a standard, but it should be.
Regardless, this service solves a problem that does not exist whatsoever. My guess is they will go out of business in a few years.
You can share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write down.
So it's a problem.
[0] Public Land Survey System https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html
You can find more at our website: qalocate.com
Digging into this on Crunchbase, it turns out that some of the funders behind W3W are HUGE names[0,1]:
* Intel
* Daimler
* Sony
To me, this lends credence to the idea that many investors are either just in it for the money--despite what their mission statements say, or just plane stupid.
0 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/... 1 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...
The individual details of the systems don't really matter. Sure, they each have some small advantage or disadvantage, and you can argue about them for a long time, but in the end, what matters is usage/adoption.
A widespread but suboptimal system is better than a system with better properties that few people know/use, because the differences barely matter.
Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient need for such a system that ordinary people would regularly come into contact with it, and any group of people that does have such a need already found a (proprietary) solution, so it's unlikely we'll get a standard soon unless big players agree on one and aggressively push for it.
Of course a lot of the shortcomings about W3W would apply to to this system too (offensive phrases, lack of relation between nearby points, etc.) Anyone know of something, open source or otherwise, that exists?
In case of an emergency you go to a link and read out your location.
If the gps is enabled shouldn't the location of the person in need be automatically logged when he opens the link ?
Why should he even say the name of the location ?
I also know of at least 2 other open source alternatives (what3ducks and what3fucks).
After playing a bit with their interface I can't really tell if they're successful but it does seem like it would be relatively complicated to come up with such a word list in many languages. That being said, it could probably be crowdsourced.
(It can be made hierarchical, just chunk the lat-long first!) (Just clean the dictionary of any homonyms!) (You can get error correction by XORing the three word indexes together to generate a check word!)
https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-b...
But the idea sounds interesting. I won't be using it anytime soon, but I can see it can be useful to Ron Swanson who hides his gold arbitrarily under trees in forest. :)
What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?
Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res for normal street addresses, much to coarse for anything else)? what is the problem supposed to be that W3W wants to solve? I sure dont see it...
location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.
So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone.
I wonder which one's more convenient.
Looks like Lat/Long win again.
Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at least close enough?
So you don't get a checksum; perhaps if you are typing your own address in and are shown a map you will wonder why it's showing Timbuktu... but if someone else's address is in the middle of Siberia you won't know how to correct it.
If you just want to make it easier to remember numbers, just convert them to a pronounceable base.
Like bacadamafuge
Heard of plus codes, though. Which is definitely what I'll use if/when I need something more human-friendly than lat&lon.
2) On Google Maps and almost all other popular maps on the web, Earth is a sphere, see EPSG:3857
(or, more precisely, solves one corner of a problem while destroying many much broader solutions)
Creating a knock-off that solves the OS problems still fails to recover from the broader problems that the W3W 'solution' provides zero ability to actually navigate without a continuous link to their server. A knock-off with better OS cred would still fail the same way.