Google's New 'Plus Codes' Are An Open Source, Global Alternative To Street Addresses (9to5google.com) 183
Google has developed a "simple and consistent addressing system that works across India and globally." Called "Plus Codes," the location-based digital addressing system is designed for people with addresses that are not easily located through conventional descriptors like street names or house numbers. That's half of the world's urban population, according to a World Bank estimate. 9to5Google reports: Notably, this open source solution composed of 10 characters works globally and can be incorporated by other products and platforms for free, with a developer page available here. It works offline and on print when overlaid as a grid on existing maps. Places that are close together share similar plus codes, while the system is identifiable by the "+" symbol in every address. "This system is based on dividing the geographical surface of the Earth into tiny 'tiled areas,' attributing a unique code to each of them," reports Google. "This code simply comprises a '6-character + City' format that can be generated, shared and searched by anyone -- all that's needed is Google Maps on a smartphone."
The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters -- about the size of one half of a basketball court. The area code is not needed when navigating within a town, while another optional character can be appended to provide additional accuracy down to a 3 x 3 meter region. Users of Google Maps in India will be able to easily find the plus code for any area in the app, while the mapping service along with Search will support the entry of the new coordinate system. Plus codes for any location can also be found with this tool.
The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters -- about the size of one half of a basketball court. The area code is not needed when navigating within a town, while another optional character can be appended to provide additional accuracy down to a 3 x 3 meter region. Users of Google Maps in India will be able to easily find the plus code for any area in the app, while the mapping service along with Search will support the entry of the new coordinate system. Plus codes for any location can also be found with this tool.
Not invented here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Not invented here (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention what3words location
Re: Not invented here (Score:5, Informative)
https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems
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This is Swatch internet time all over again.
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Not to mention what3words location
This is nothing like what3words where codes with small variations are likely to be on different continents. For example "hers.post.back" is in Kent, England and "hers.spot.back" is in Tennessee USA. Actually I have trouble figuring out just what what3words is good for.
Google's system only took 6 characters to locate the entrance to my building on Google maps and 8 characters to locate the entrance to a local shopping mall. I mention the mall because yesterday I saw a man collapsed on the floor inside and pe
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Google's system only took 6 characters to locate the entrance to my building on Google maps and 8 characters to locate the entrance to a local shopping mall. I mention the mall because yesterday I saw a man collapsed on the floor inside and people calling the ambulance. This would have been a compact way to specify which of the many entrances was closest to the patient.
If you know your location (you have to, in able for Google maps to give a Plus Code) you can also communicate that. It is just like what3words, it is an extra translation from data you already have. The implied benefits are only attained with extra hardware that make the system redundant because by having that extra hardware you can do it without this translation anyway.
Re: Not invented here (Score:3, Informative)
Or MGRS...
Re:Not invented here (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:
https://github.com/google/open... [github.com]
Re:Not invented here (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:
https://github.com/google/open... [github.com]
That write-up is pretty much a perfect case study of the classic xkcd comic "There are 14 competing standards" [xkcd.com].
Re:Not invented here (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:
https://github.com/google/open... [github.com]
That write-up is pretty much a perfect case study of the classic xkcd comic "There are 14 competing standards" [xkcd.com].
Only if you don't understand the comic, or don't understand the write-up, or both.
The point of the comic is that there are a whole bunch of standards and the idea is to invent a single new standard to replace them all. Which doesn't work, and just adds to the pile of standards.
The point of the plus codes writeup is to evaluate the existing standards to see if any of them meets the requirements of one particular set of use cases. Since it's determined that no existing standard does the job, a new one is created, not to replace the others but to address the requirements at hand.
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Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:
https://github.com/google/open... [github.com]
That write-up is pretty much a perfect case study of the classic xkcd comic "There are 14 competing standards" [xkcd.com].
However, given the sheer power of Google and ubiquity of GMaps, it will prevail. It also has a bunch of benefits over all the other options, most of which don't necessarily tie it to Maps.
I for one welcome our new Plus-sized overlords.
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Ugh. There are already too many, they even didn't include MGRS or GARS. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System for example. I don't see any improvements of this system over other systems
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I use MGRS all the time, but for a 1 meter area, Google's system is four characters shorter. Not that I'm promoting it, just saying it is as precise with 10 compared to 14 with MGRS.
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"I don't see any improvements of this system over other systems"
This one works with Google Earth and Maps.
That's reason enough.
Re:Not invented here (Score:4, Insightful)
Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.
Plusgoogle. Next up: Doubpleplusgoogle, it'll be the new "2.0".
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Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps.
The assumption is that most everyone will have (or at least, have access to) a smart phone anyway. Given the way things are going, that's not such a bad assumption.
As for needing Google Maps, that would be true if the system was proprietary, but since it's open-source, any organization can use it independently -- neither using Google sofwware nor accessing Google servers is required.
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That's why I tend to trust Apple much more than Google for my consumer products.
Apple is not an advertising platform -- they're selling me 'ol fashioned hardware (with a huge markup) with the understanding that they're up-front about their business model. You buy a Google Pixel2 and you're still paying for hardware, but also signing up for their spyware "services" -- to sell you personalized ads at best, and a "helpful" older male sibling at worst.
And that gives Google access to all your stuff. (Score:5, Informative)
Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.
And that gives Google access to essentially everything on your smartphone (as I just discovered when trying to shut down some unwanted apps.)
Google Maps itself claims it only needs permission for "your location". Reasonable, you'd think.
But disable Google Play Services and Google Maps starts complaining about how it "won't work unless you enable" it. So it has an unannounced (until you break it) proprietary pipe to the other app.
Google Play Services wants permissions for:
- Body Sensors,
- Calendar,
- Camera,
- Contacts,
- Microphone,
- Phone,
- SMS, and
- Storage
(and you EXPECT it to be "phoning home" to google.) Combine that with Maps' permission to
- your location
and you've got quite the collection of information on you that you've just given Google's app framework permission to report to Google and/or modify.
Seems to me the android Apps -> Permissions interface, by not calling out the other apps that a given app communicates with, along with THEIR permissions, nor refusing an app permission to talk to another with additional permissions, is deceptive and gives false confidence.
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Didn't click the link, not expecting to find "we wanted our own snowflake system that does exactly what we want, and is less useful outside our organization than existing standards that may already be in use"
Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
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Didn't click the link, not expecting to find "we wanted our own snowflake system that does exactly what we want, and is less useful outside our organization than existing standards that may already be in use"
Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
It's more useful than a US Zip Code because it is more precise. (and more logical). There are different uses for either system. A computer would find CMXR+X6 more useful, but a human who is looking for your house will find the street address more useful (actually, ideally, a human would want both)- get in the ballpark with maps and the code and then the address so they can confirm visually when they see your house.
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No, Google think this would be a useful system in parts in developing countries with less formal address systems. For example, there are 1 million inhabitants in Kathmandu, but the majority of the roads have no names and there are also no street numbers. So when you send a parcel, you don't need to describe it as "past the ABC Hostel, then third street on the right; the house next to the large birch tree". I think the criteria they set are quite sensible, but many of them are indeed fulfilled by the Maid
Re:Not invented here (Score:4, Informative)
No, ti's because there's no standard on addressing, period.
Even in the developed world there are places without street names [youtube.com] but every location is well specified. (Basically there all buildings are on a coordinate system so you're really just giving effectively an (x, y) coordinate to get the building)..
Also, it's to avoid the mojibake [wikipedia.org] scenarios when alternative character sets are used
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They might have no english names on google maps. But most certainly they have names. Worst case you have to make a photo of the sanskrit name and draw it on the parcel or envelop if you want to sent mail.
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I really don't think you need to be an SJW to not want your address to be, for example, "ASSHOLE"
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... which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
And here you've just found the REAL reason Google created this system.
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Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
That doesn't work everywhere. Many countries have streets without names. in fact even my hometown in Canada had two [google.ca] streets [google.ca] they gave names to for no other reason that emergency services needed to find them. In Costa Rica for instance, not all major streets even have names and there are no house numbers making the entire country a confusing mess for even the locals.
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Doesn't even mention the Canadian Postal Code, which seems to satisfy nearly all of google's requirements. Add two more characters, and it would satisfy, I think, each and every single one.
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Can you elaborate? Canadian Postal Codes seem to work the same way as postal codes in other countries. For example, if I want to specify a specific point somewhere in a large forest, there would not be a postal code for this. I don't think there would is a simple algorithm that transforms longitude and latitude to Canadian Postal Codes. In a nutshell, not at all like the open location codes.
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Specifically, Canadian postal codes are not geographic, but nothing's stopping the algorithm from being so. The first character denotes (roughly) the province, from east to west. The rest is the postal delivery route -- which means my neighbours to the left and to the right are identical or off by a single number, whereas the neighbour behind me (on a different street) is off by two characters. While not "geographic" in spatial terms, it's geographic by postal route, which is (obviously) by street. So fo
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I disagree. What you're saying makes sense only when you're saying it standing in one place.
The airspace rules, road rules, commercial rules, and employment rules are drastically different from place to place. So if you're going to try to describe everyone the same way, then you fall into the horrible trap familiar to most as XML. Look, a standard definition language that has no meaning in and of itself. So you spend forever defining stuff.
Spoken languages are, historically, different for those same rea
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I think the reasoning is the zero and one can be read as O or I (or L), so words can still occur with common number->letter substitutions. But as I said, I'm not sure this is a sufficient reason to invent a completely new system.
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3x3 option code almost mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
3x3m is your average NYC apartment or Indian slum house, you also need to encode elevation and room/apartment numbers in many cases since you could have your code shared by many tenants both in the same plane as well as vertically.
Also, encode up to 1x1m if this is going to be useful for any modern delivery methods (eg robot truck or drone).
Re:3x3 option code almost mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
look if it just gets 10 meters then thats okay.
it would work for ordering mcdonalds or whatever. in thailand most roads don't have names on the maps and some roads have different number on here maps vs. google maps. openstreetmaps. it's really fucking annoying. the local mcdonalds operation has a map where you can put in your location... .... but it turns it into a street address that possibly points to 10 km away. ..so instead of explaining just an address, they will call you up and you need to have someone local to explain basically where the place is and even then it's a crapshoot if they understand which gas station they're meant to turn at.
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We don't need street names in the UK, just building number and post code. I can see that this Google proposal could physically locate something more quickly, especially given how inaccurate Google Maps can be.
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It depends, perhaps in Thailand but for something to be used it needs to work universally. I can see the usage of the model for eg. drone deliveries across the world, you tell Amazon ship my package to 5N33-1337, I'm in Thailand, now ship to 413Z-4421 relatively more easy to remember and communicate than GPS coordinates but it needs to be useful enough to land my drone, 10m is the difference between a landing spot, a crash or my neighbor.
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That is because you don't know the tricks.
You would not memorize the exact position, but longitude/latitude seperately from minutes and second.
And of course you would use minutes and seconds and not decimal places after the degree.
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That is a problem with google maps and Apple maps, too.
Of course the streets have names, they are written on the small metal rectangles nailed to eother posts or the house walls at the beginning of the street.
However I agree, the guys making the delievery have the same problem like you, their maps apps don't show the street names correctly or not at all.
News...? (Score:5, Informative)
Google developed the Open Location Code in 2014, and it's been part of Google Maps since 2015...
So... (Score:5, Informative)
Oblig. XKCD reference [xkcd.com]
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
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Which is probably why only one of those two is in the database.
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This seems to be the same three word system created by Chris Sheldrick and discussed last year on a TED talk. He describes the rationale behind it and how it is currently being used in remote areas. The three word concept is nice in that words are easy to remember, but those words are meaningless as a guide to where the location is. Latitude/longitude are the opposite. Google's system somewhere in between.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chri... [ted.com]
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There are also Gray Codes - normally those are used for weather vanes and anything that rotates and needs to avoid errors due to signal nose.. In theory, you could have a global coordinate system using these. The Manhattan distance between two coordinate is simply the number of bits that change, but if you want accurate distance, the regular GPS coordinates are better.
UK has 7 digit post codes. These identify a small area, such as a block of apartments or row of houses, but you still need to specify the bui
I really hope they try to patent this... (Score:4, Interesting)
First obvious reference would be the UTM map coordinate system which also works off 100x100 km squares, here we use 6, 8, 10 or even more digits to designate any spot on the globe, to any desired accuracy/precision. (6 digits typically give you 100x100m squares, 8 digits 10x10m and with 10 digits you have a single square meter.) This system have been used in the military for a _long_ time now.
Next we have the What3Words idea which have already been mentioned, giving approximately 3x3m resolution using 3 english-language words which makes it much easier to memorize or send to someone else.
Terje
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First obvious reference would be the UTM map coordinate system which also works off 100x100 km squares, here we use 6, 8, 10 or even more digits to designate any spot on the globe, to any desired accuracy/precision. (6 digits typically give you 100x100m squares, 8 digits 10x10m and with 10 digits you have a single square meter.) This system have been used in the military for a _long_ time now.
Next we have the What3Words idea which have already been mentioned, giving approximately 3x3m resolution using 3 english-language words which makes it much easier to memorize or send to someone else.
Terje
I personally find my W3W code to be awesome, but it's very confusing - after being assigned the code, I searched and there were 2 others that popped up on the search - one across the country and another in a different continent.
If someone got my W3W wrong, my package or whatever would be going very far away.
Maybe W3W would be a good supplement to an actual mailing address but sucks for places where there is no street name or the street name itself is super-confusing (e.g. Springfield city).
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Convert those into barcodes and put them on street signs using invisible ink. Conspiracy theory nuts used to think the maintenance bar codes at the back of street signs were some kind of geo-location code for the army to take people to the nearest FEMA camps when GPS wasn't working.
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I'm having trouble figuring out how to comment without manually copying part of my username into the body of my post. Can anyone help me figure out how to not do that? Everyone else has this figured out but me.
Terje
Log in first?
what3words (Score:2)
It's a shame they haven't adopted what3words (https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_sheldrick_a_precise_three_word_address_for_every_place_on_earth) instead - Easily rememberable addresses like "blocks.evenly.breed", vs "F26X+9F Gurugram" as a Plus Code.
Re:what3words (Score:4, Insightful)
Disagree. What3Words is proprietary. Something like this needs to be open source really. And whilst w3w may have the advantage of being easily remembered, you cannot tell whether two addresses are close-by. I also don't think it works well across languages as every location has a different name in different languages - the words are not translated but completely different words are used in different languages.
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They could have used the ham radio locator [qthlocator.free.fr] instead of inventing yet another locator tool.
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I suspect as for commercial use of frequencies there is likely a commercial prohibition on using the Maidenhead Locator System.
You can get all sorts of commercial GPS devices that support the Maidenhead Locator system http://www.n7cfo.com/vhf/gps/~... [n7cfo.com]
About the only "real" difference between google's system is that the Maidenhead system the minor details of the encoding the longitude and latitude...
Maidenhead is basically as follows...
First pair base18 [A-R], second pair base10 [0-9], third pair base24 [a-x], fourth pair base10 [0-9], subsequent pairs alternating in the 3-4 pattern after that. By alternating base encodings, it is a
gps coordinates (Score:2, Interesting)
A quick run through wolfram alpha converting gps coordinates to base 36
4z.zzz = 179.999978
4z.zzy = 179.999957
Difference = 0.000021 degrees
At the equator, 1 degree = 111320m longitude and 110575m latitude (based on a quick google) which makes the 5 digit base36 encoded gps coordinates accurate to within a 2.5m x 2.5m box at the equator, and a much smaller box closer to the poles.
That's within the 3m x 3m area that google's new thingo does. Drop the decimal (or base-36al) points, and you have your character s
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Yeah, but if you make it simple and based on what everyone uses today, you don't get to put out a press release about how your new standard for doing things that there's already at least 5 standards for is so shiny and spiffy.
They're solving problems that already have solutions, dammit! Stop making sense!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Google created “Plus Codes” for addresses that are not easily located through conventional descriptors like street names or house numbers. In fact, according to a World Bank estimate, half of the world’s urban population lives on unnamed streets.
Even simpler solution (Score:2)
I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile." I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, "E6".
-- Steven Wright
Thank you! (Score:2)
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Better than eircode (Score:4)
This is much better than the Irish eircode system...
With eircode, each dwelling get's their own 'postcode'. This means that in an apartment block, each individual apartment has it's own postcode. Which is nice.
But... they went to great strides to ensure that your neighbours have a completely different eircode. The codes are 'random' in order to ensure this. So it means that if someone sends you something but they wrote the code down marginally incorrect, your package will be delivered to someone several km away and not to your neighbours.
It also means that you need to either have (and have to buy) a copy of the ever-updating database locally, or have online access in order to lookup the eircode to see where you are going. And if you need to look up many of them, they'll charge you.
*sigh*
At least Google added them to maps. But they aren't a very well thought out system. This Plus system makes a lot more sense.
Do we need another grid system? (Score:2)
A long string of letters and numbers is not easily memorised. There's no mnemonic aspect to it. We're wasting a lot of bandwidth since a large number of grids exist entirely in the ocean, and we get a huge number in the arctic and antarctic despite the very low population density in these regions. Regions by the borders of
GPS locator (Score:2)
US Army grid coordinates (Score:3)
google just reinvented what the military has done for decades. they even have math equations to convert grids to GPS coordinates and back the other way
Re:US Army grid coordinates (Score:5, Informative)
I guess MGRS isn't "cool" enough. "Plus codes" are "hip" and "cool" or whatever the kids are saying these days.
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I saw in another thread that plus codes apparently get more precision out of fewer characters. That would make it easier to memorize.
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Perhaps. I've not looked into it.
MGRS DOES have additional information I left out. It was originally a paper map system. So there are what's called Map Sheet Designators. Each Map Sheet Designator is good for something like 100km x 100km or something like that. And then the coordinate pairs in there refer to the region of that map sheet. So 3456 7834 alone wouldn't be clear, you'd need to know which map it went to. Can easily read up more on Wikipedia, but it looks like I got the basics right: https://en.w [wikipedia.org]
No checksum (Score:3)
Eircode - but they have street names and addresses (Score:2)
Eircode [eircode.ie] assigns one post code per address. Yes, you have your own post code and you don't need to be Richie Rich. Talk about browsing a database by index key.
and office and apartment numbers? (Score:2)
and office and apartment numbers?
Gee, what a great name! (Score:2)
So we've got google plus, with its plus tagging, and now we have plus codes, which have nothing to do with plus or with plus tagging. That won't confuse anyone at all, ever!
Yo what up (Score:2)
Convenient Bombing Coordinates! (Score:2)
Google Military Prime!
When is absolutely positively needs to be blown up in two days!
What's wrong with Lat/Lon? (Score:2)
Sounds like Military Map Coordinates (Score:2)
This sounds very much like military map coordinates used the by U.S. military... In fact, I wonder if it corresponds identically?
However, the city navigation part is interesting to me. I haven't read how that part works yet but from the description, I am imagining that even if a city crosses over the line partly into another "area code", the coordinates are still useful... For example, if the left of an area starts at 0 and goes right to 1000 then one could speak of negative numbers to mean so far to the l
Doomed to fail (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Street addresses work when there is a street to address.
In some countries, the streets literally have no name - Japan springs to mind. In Japan, the blocks have names and the streets are just the space between the blocks. Asking someone what street they live on is the same as asking someone here what is the name of the block you live on? Then the numbers sometimes go in order around the block, except there are often gaps where two properties have been merged, or numbers out of order where one property has been subdivided. In other countries, there are no streets. There are paths, there are tracks, but there may not be a street with a name.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan has addresses, they just aren't street addresses. But they work and are unique, and unless you are a web form developer who thinks the whole world has middle names, states and zip codes, no problem that needs solving exists. They just have a different system.
Many countries have their own variations of systems. Whether street numbers are sequential or even/odd divided upon the two sides. If different entrances to the same building get different numbers, or an entrance designator (e.g. in Vienna you very often get a street address like Somestreet 5/2 where the /2 indicates the 2nd entrance).
This system and its competitors were invented to address your second situation - where no streets exist. That could be geographical (villages clustered around a central point but without streets per se) or circumstancial (slums with no official streets existing) or for any other kind of reason (that old castle on the mountain which is now a Hotel).
I honestly have no idea why they invented a system for that. We already can give the coordinates of any point on Earth with any amount of precision that you need. Sure, VXX7+39 might be slightly shorter than 38.8973,-77.0364 - but it doesn't give me information, for example how far away QXW5+38 is. 38.8039,-77.022 does.
But all that is besides the point. Cities are not just their geography. Many large buildings, for example, have one official entrance for the public to use. The geography of the building doesn't tell you that. The street address does. And many buildings have their doors close to the next buildings entrance, I know several examples where they can both easily fall within the same 3x3m square. Street address makes it clear.
A street address also tells me (if I know the numbering system) which end of a street I need to start at. Here in Vienna, for example,6CJ8+QV and 7FGH+6M are on the same street. The Plus codes gives you no useful information whatsoever. With the street address you can take one look at the nearest building and understand which direction and about how far away each of these destinations is if you are somewhere on that street.
So as a real-life navigation system, zero usefulness.
As a coordinate system, weaker than the ones we already have.
Plus (pun intended) you need access to Google Maps to figure out your current location in Plus Code. But every smartphone will tell you your GPS coordinates, doesn't even need a working network.
Even after checking their Benefits page [plus.codes] I still fail to see any advantage whatsoever.
what3words at least has the benefit of memorability.
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I agree conventional addresses are a lot more useful to the pedestrian or even the driver without a GPS unit of some kind in hand.
One problem they do suffer from though is sometimes the names change. That is fine for storing delivery/calling on information about locating a person or business where the address will get updated; its a not a good system for location of things at all. A location system should feature immutability.
The other thing sometimes street names don't confer much navigation information.
Just used to it (Score:2)
I agree conventional addresses are a lot more useful to the pedestrian or even the driver without a GPS unit of some kind in hand.
Only because we've built up our infrastructure with conventional addresses in mind. It would be an expensive but straightforward proposition to change that to something more universal. Every system will have its flaws but I'd be supportive of a system that didn't require an intimate knowledge of local geography to navigate and that was consistent no matter where you went.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Japanese addresses are almost useless for locating a building unless you have the neighborhood's map at hand: Because the numbers are assigned more or less chronologically, standing in front of Naninani-ku 1-3-1 does not mean you are anywhere near Naninani-ku 1-4-1. Unless you're in one of the places that uses a different system, which may be more systematic for coarse locations but not much more helpful for building locations.
"Plus Codes" are just a radix-20 method for expressing latitude and longitude. If you know how far away 38.8039,-77.022 is, that is only because you have a lot of practice using that notation. A "ten digit" Plus Code (which is 11 characters long because they add that plus sign) has resolution of 0.000125 degrees in both latitude and longitude, so it gives more precise location than your 15-character string.
Overall, I would say that Google devised Plus Codes because they didn't know about MGRS, or wanted to make something quasi-proprietary. It is weird that they spend so much space complaining [github.com] about other lat/long-based locating systems without applying the same rules to Plus Codes.
W3W's major drawbacks are that it is proprietary and that it needs a huge database to translate locations. A minor drawback is that it breaks down at sea.
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So as a real-life navigation system, zero usefulness.
That depends on what you mean by "real-life navigation". When you are walking on a named street that you are familiar with you can use street numbers (if you can find them on the buildings). But this system is intended for Google Maps, so a Cartesian grid (or really, a grid of grids) makes perfect sense. Find the 100 x 100 kilometer locality, then zero in on the spot of interest. That is far more efficient than trying to figure out how a street is numbered when looking at a map.
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Sure, VXX7+39 might be slightly shorter than 38.8973,-77.0364 - but it doesn't give me information, for example how far away QXW5+38 is. 38.8039,-77.022 does.
VXX7+39 is a lot easier for a human to remember than 38.8973,-77.0364. You can remember that and punch it in for your Dominos delivery 3 years from now. Also, being able to calculate distances easily isn't really the point. This is a system to make it easier for computers and computer driven systems. They likely have no difficulty calculating the distance between VXX7+39 and QXW5+38. Stupid human need only remember his/her own code and plug it in.
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I always was fond of having 'adress fields' mot subdivided into zip and street and city etc. ... why split it up first and then have extra logic to retrievve it from the DB and format it again gor printing?
But just let users write their name in the 'natural order' of their language, and the same for the address.
In the end that is hiw a software system will print it on an adress label for a parcel
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addresses that are not easily located through conventional descriptors like street names or house numbers. That's half of the world's urban population, according to a World Bank estimate.
No, they don't work for half of the world's urban population because they don't have addresses.
That was even in the summary!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (The European City Centre With No Street Names)
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They need that for conventional addresses, too.
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There is no such thing as "Lawful Good Company". 150 years ago Marx have written "There is no such crime which captitalist wouldn't commit for 300% margin".
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Boy, I miss the days when Google was a Lawful Good company.
Such days never existed. You were just blinded by fanboyism.
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Whatever you need to tell yourself for buying into that bullshit “Don’t be evil” meme.
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Google's alignment falls roughly into the triangular region bounded by "Chaotic Good", "Lawful Neutral", and "Neutral Neutral" (Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis, Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other, Neutral Neutral in the middle).
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If it turns out your location is Where The Hell, can you petition to have them change it?
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