Universal Alphanumeric Postal Code Proposed 595
Meshach writes "An article in the Globe and Mail is discussing a possible change to the way postal codes are assigned over the world. NAC Geographic Products will be using Microsoft's MapPoint to power their Mobile Location-Based Services Network, which could change all postal codes in the world to a simpler, more universal format."
Complex Codes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Try remembering that one. I'm happy with five numbers. Atleast I can make some sort of memory device of that.
Nice thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice thought... but its like the metric system. Who will want to change what they have known for many a lifetime.
I know my 60 year old dad who does carpentry will never learn the metric system, even though it would be easier, why would he, or the millions like him want to learn a new addressing scheme?
Simple? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the poster:
From the article:
Um, is that encrypted? Simpler than what? An IPv6 address?
Oh, simpler for everyone except us those who aren't in the postal and geographic industries.
what wrong with the original? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too complicated for 99% of mail (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, this is only one more digit than a "zip+4" here in the USA, but mixing letters in there is going to be a disaster for the postal service. Their OCR has a hard enough time with decoding zip codes. Now they have to figure out the difference between a Q and a zero. I hope this system is smart enough NOT to implement "O," "S," and "Z" as letters.
Besides, most mail is local. It's like dialing the country code and area code just to order a pizza.
Yeah, that'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
Precision: Swap two digits and your letter to Grandma ends up Beyond Rangoon.
Availability: MS owns the postal system. Can't wait to see the EULA ("By licking this stamp...").
Change is bad (for software) (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody will have to convert all these fields to normal strings...
(though I do hope whatever system is chosen won't make use of both "0" and "O", or both "1" and "l" - let's 1earn something from 0ur mistakes).
military-grade postal codes (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't even like people knowing what side of a street I'm on from my current postal code.
Re:Nice thought (Score:5, Insightful)
The point here is this would provide a fix to the issue of standardized postal codes in the long term. Just because it's not status-quo doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Somehow... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you imagine the chip that has a GPS receiver and that can translate into this adressing system?
CHIP: "Dear BSA - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following software
"Dear Ms. Rosen - Computer Serial Number 123456789 has the following MP3s
Etc.
John
Re:Nice thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Your statement is quite ironic, seeing as how the carpentry that you mentioned is one of the very, very few areas where fractional measurement DOES have some strong merits over metric. : )
steve
They've had this in the military for ages.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose is not to locate point X on a sphere, we already have a perfectly adequate global coordinate system for that.
Re:Yeah, that'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a serious problem, since as the article mentioned, they want to use these codes to replace addresses, instead of adding them on.
ZIP codes in the US aid sorting (because they are based on carrier routes instead of simple geographic area) and provide redundancy in the address, so if you mess up something in the address or zip code, there's enough info for a human to correct it. If people switched to using only the new code, that redundancy goes away.
Re:Nice thought (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unworkable, because, in the case of U.S. Zip Codes, the current codes are tied to post offices and carrier routes, which don't necessarily subdivide neatly into equally-sized geographic areas. Tying postal codes to arbitrary geographic regions would be a step backwards.
But it's also unnecessary. Why force each postal system to adopt a uniform coding scheme? Why not let them keep their coding schemes and append a country code to the front.
This works for phone numbers: Each national phone system need not have the same number of digits in their phone numbers. They simply need a unique country code.
Universal . . . ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft + Postal Service = .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real answer is that GPS wouldn't make any money for NAC Geographic Products, whereas this proprietary system would, through licensing to various governments around the world.
But, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Postal Service likes its system just fine and will not change it to someone elses liking. Kinda like the metric system. Even if the new system is better. The same is true for the Royal Mail. We already saw how quick England was to jump on the EC bandwagon and adopt the Euro. Indeed far too many countries will be unwilling to change for this system to go global.
I'd have to sayto NAC Geographic Products; nice try but, no money for you.
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be picky... (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine the fun if someone could get into that system and readjust the root so the origin is at, oh I don't know, Calcutta. The world's whole mail would end up in the wrong place.
Also, what happens for blocks of flats (or, more generally, seperate entities which happen to overlap the same 1m^2 resolution of the addressing-space)?
Last but not least: when I go to the post-office to send a package, the cashier looks at the bottom line of the address and automatically knows which country I'm sending it to. Isn't that something worth preserving rather than making the poor fellow type in the relevant co-ordinates to an Internet-enabled Windows XP Geographic Edition PC, skirting his way past a couple of BSODs, and figuring out I'm sending the damned thing to all of 12 miles to the centre of town?
And don't forget that if your PC isn't Palladium-compatible, it won't be able to print addresses on envelopes!
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, the solution proposed by NAC is aesthetically ugly to me though. Who wants to write (or can even remember!) 10-digit codes like that?
Re:GPS (Score:5, Insightful)
It gets better!
Let's say that you wanted to narrow things down to approximately 1-mile. 1-mile is approx 1 minute (1/60 of one degree) of longitude.
360 degrees * 60 minutes = 21600 different minutes on the face of the earth.
26 letters plus 10 numbers = 36! Subtract "confusables" (I, O, S, Z) -- 32 possible characters! 32^3 = 32768! The number of character combinations is greater than the number of minutes in one direction. It is a simple math exercise to create a base-32 numbering system and to enumerate all possible minute/second combinations.
Therefore, three characters can represent your latitude to the nearest mile (give or take), and another three characters for your longitude! A new universal six-digit zip code!
And all of this in 5 minutes with a simple calculator! What is the big deal? Devising a system such as this is trivial. Getting people to use it is the hard part.
Useful for the postal office, not for people (Score:3, Insightful)
The postal office on the other hand, would probably go for this as it would reduce the time and cost to handle a letter or a package. Even if it is by a second/letter, it will make a big difference. However, unless they seriously reduce the postage, I'm never gona spend time looking up weird codes, they'll have to do that themselves.
Now, all this is very interesting, but personally, I do hope that snailmail will go away and be (for most things) replaced by electronic mail, which is faster, cheaper, healthier for the environment and, used correctly, more secure too.
Full address? (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise, sounds like a clever idea that I'm pretty sure will never take off, for reasons of varying 'legitimacy' (perhaps too hard to remember/resistance to change/the mark of the beast crowd).
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is fine when you are printing the addresses from a database. That's great for businesses. But remembering addresses is going to be a real pain. Worse still, it divorces the postal address from the real world components that you use to physically find the place. Oh, and most of the addresses I use on a regular basis are clustered. So only a few of the digits will vary. So I will be trying to remember a new piece of information about each of my friends. And it will be non-mnemonic and easily interchangable with the addresses of each of several other friends. No thanks.
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:5, Insightful)
My city name is not conceptually grasped as seven characters; it is a single mimetic construct. Humans have a much easier time identifying with the name of a place than they do with a random string of letters and numbers. "Phoenix, Arizona" means something more than a physical location in space. It's a community. It's the warmth of the sun at my back. It's the image of Scottsdale, panning wide with dust-tan gravel and bounding jackrabbits. It's the two jutting masses of high-rises on either side of the I-10. It's six dozen hole-in-a-wall dance clubs. It's open skies, painfully blue and clear at six in the morning; it's raging thunderstorms on an August afternoon, with whole pepper trees sailing down the road at 50 miles an hour. My mind recalls all these things, and each of them reinforces the neural pathway that says "Phoenix". What do your ten letters and numbers mean, sir? What memories do they offer? What emotions do they evoke?
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
My objection to this plan is why invent some new alphanumeric coding? Why not just use latitude and longitude?
Re:They've had this in the military for ages.... (Score:2, Insightful)
So if I move my mailbox to the other side of my driveway I have changed my address?
Good idea.
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:2, Insightful)
In the USA, ZIP codes are set up to send mail to the substation that is best able to DEAL with the delivery, based on staffing, mailloads, etc. and the ZIP+5 indicates which carrier's route it's on. I'm less than a mile from the closest station, but it's handling a lot of business mail. The station that actually delivers my mail is about 10 miles away.
And let's have every company in the world REPRINT its letterhead and advertising brochures to add the UMDC (Universal Mail Delivery Code).
Re:about damn time! (Score:2, Insightful)
Considering many people today just enter a number into their the phone book of the mobile phone and never again see the actual digits, I think a system where you could register a logical name (something similar to an url) and have that automatically translated by the phone system to your current phone number (just like a DNS) would be more useful.
Concatenate Country code and Zip (Score:2, Insightful)
We already have a universal system. Goes like this
Country ID + Country Zip. Problem solved
Every country has a two alphanumerice code and every country has a zip system. If the latter is not the case a new system is sure not going to solve that problem.
Street Signs (Score:2, Insightful)
That dreaded 2. ?????? seems to be missing again (Score:3, Insightful)
What they have completely forgotten is that the current ZIP code system does not represent the actual lattitude/logitude position of the city or town, but instead the main routing office that the letter needs to get to, and then the sub-office it should be routed to from there to reach the route that this letter needs to be on. The +4 extention tells in which route it needs to be placed, and where the postman encounters the address within that route... Any relationship between ZIP Codes and GPS coordinates are purely coinsidental, and the numbers might seem completely random to an outsider, but it makes perfect since to the people who run the postal system. They've got no reason to break their already set up system to go to this... the ZIP code is more useful to them.
Come on... all NAC has really invented here is a base-36 expression of the same latitude and longitude numbers that we've been measuring in degrees, hours, minutes, and seconds, and they've come to the stunning conclusion that their system specifies the same location in fewer characters... duh. No stunning breakthrough here, just marketing hype.
1. Propose new addressing scheme.
2. ??????
3. Profit!
Re:what wrong with the original? (Score:3, Insightful)
-B
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
-Graham
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:2, Insightful)
1. At least in larger countries, the vast majority of mail is domestic. Thus, postal critters care most about domestic sorting. As it is now, the USPS can identify (in theory) any mailbox in the country with 11 digits. I think that Canada's and Britain's systems can do the same thing. Meanwhile, nearly all sorting of foreign mail is left to the foreign country...there's a slot for Afghanistan, one for Albania, one for Algeria, etc. and that's it. At present, you can sort nearly all mail in 11 keystrokes or less, or just turn it over to OCR. Why retool the entire system? Perhaps in Europe it's quite different, but that's what pan-European codes (eg D-93482 for some location in Germany) are for.
2. No information redundancy. As a postal worker, I saw one heck of a lot of screwed up mail. Yet most of it could go through. Why? Because if the Zip code wasn't there, there was still city and state. If city and state were wrong, there was still some kind person who could figure out where they were going most of the time. Try doing that with 8CNB5 Q8Z4R.
3. No real-world use. It helps to be able to use addresses for more than just mail...can you imagine asking a cab driver to take you to 8CKJ3 W3K4J?
Sure, what we have now isn't the most efficient thing, but it directly matches reality. And old-style addresses have had codes and enhancements added on, rather than been replaced by them.
P.O. Box 553 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like a phone number?
Re:Complex Codes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, 8CNB5 Q8Z4R, I remember it well. The cool crisp air, the smell of fresh pine. And then there was 8TP9W Q3HF0, which had a pretty long winter this year.
Ok, don't get me wrong, some sort of international, standardized zone code would be great, but this is just idiotic. The company proporting this calls it "Natural Area Coding." Would someone care to tell me how a contrived encoding of latitude and longitude are "natural", when lat & lon themselves are contrived? Ok, granted, the equator as 0 is one thing, and maybe one could argue that latitudes are somewhat natural as they fall out of our common model of mathematics and geometry. Longitude, however, is flat out contrived, since its base point of 0 degrees is arbitrary.
That's not to say I think the lat & lon system is flawed, I think its fine. But if we're talking about a delivery system, it at least needs some minimum level of political or landform boundaries. At the very least, prepend national and regional codes on the front of the system. For example, someone in New York State would always have a code beginning with USNY. It might even be reasonable to use national-regional-local, which, in the US, would be national-state-county. In Albany county, NY, this might be USNYAL. Follow that with more precise coordinates and the code becomes specific. Of course, I think USNYAL 8TP9W Q3HF0 makes no more sense than USNYAL 42.6498N 73.7528W, which is precise to well under a meter.
Basicaly, they're reinventing the wheel in a rather silly way, and trying to apply it to a problem that doesn't match the solution. After all, by only seeing that number, is 8TP9W Q5HF0 in the US or Canada? Sure, a computer can route it, but a human should be able to at least make sense of it.
Q: Efficiency of Lat/Long? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the other posters, I'm thinking, why use some proprietary system instead of universally-recognized latitude and longitude coordinates (with maybe an elevation, too)?
But I'm thinking that latitude and longitude might not be the most efficient way to tesselate the surface of a sphere. Think of all the useless precision you'll waste near the poles where nobody lives - the lattitude coordinates kept to within one second of arc or better will, near the poles, come down to microns of accuracy just to compensate for the need for azimuthal location precision of a meter or so near the Earth's equator.
Isn't there some way to divide the surface up like the patches on a football/soccerball/volleyball that would enable less waste of precision?
[Think of descending a graph where the assumed root node is the whole earth's surface and the major patches might be the pentagonal regions that form a dodecahedron, the next node some way of subdividing each pentagon further, etc.]
Re:Call me a stick in the mud... (Score:1, Insightful)
Didn't used to be. Remember, dial KLondike 5-3798.
Besides, the numbers most people use on a daily basis are only 7 digits
What village are you from that still uses 7-digit numbers? Something like 91% of the population of the United States has to dial ten digits for every phone call.
My Own Humble Opinion (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, rather than having to worry about someone being able to "find you" because you have to put your physical address in circulation, unless they have access to the USPSDB, they won't be able to map your postal code to your physical location.
Not as a challenge or anything, but I've yet to see a reason why such a system would be bad.
Poor kids... (Score:3, Insightful)
"LINUX SUCKS" -- Small plot of land in western Oklahoma purchased by an unknown company in Redmond.
"LINUX RULEZ" -- Nearby plot of land purchased by a short guy in a tuxedo.
Re:My dream (Unique Post Codes) (Score:3, Insightful)
I work as a package sorter for UPS, and much of our sorting is broken down by zip code (although some is done by state or country). We sort by geographic areas, so that we can put the packages on a truck heading to that particular area. Zip codes are loosely based on geography and are therefore very useful for sorting.
Unique/portable postal codes would have no basis in geography. There is absolutely no way that human beings could sort to unique postal codes in a timely manner, and it would be prohibitively expensive to convert to a computer-based system. (Not to mention the problems with handwritten addresses, incorrect addresses, multiple labels, damaged labels, missing labels, damaged boxes, etc.)
I imagine the post office (USPS) would have similar problems.
In the UK... (Score:3, Insightful)
By doing it this way it becomes possible to sort mail efficiently for delivery using just the postcode.
Ignoring for the moment that UK GIS systems also use other references (UPRN, TOID, PAF ref, grid ref) it would seem that retooling for this new system is all cost and no benefit - except to the company selling that data.