[OSGeo-Discuss] Short codes for locations

Sun Nov 2 00:18:08 PDT 2014

If it is ‘just’ a code for a location, why not use a latitude longitude? These days, people advertise their office locations on website with coordinates, along with the street address. Having to remember coordinates is not much different to remembering an alphanumeric code… 

The advantage of the Australian rural addressing and Saudi addressing schemes is that they can be assigned automatically (without political or cultural debate about the names) and can easily be transformed for use in a more formal setting later on.  

Regards,
--
Serena Coetzee

Geography Building 3-5
Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield, 0028, South Africa
email: serena.coetzee at up.ac.za Web: www.up.ac.za/cgis 
Mobile: +27 82 464 4294 · Tel: +27 12 420 3823 · Fax: +27 12 420 6385

On Oct 31, 2014, at 2:14 PM, Doug Rinckes <drinckes at google.com> wrote:

Thanks for that document, Serena. Based on a quick scan, it seems to be aimed towards areas that already have an addressing system or are in the process of defining one. In contrast, I want to provide a solution for those people in locations that don't have addresses, and may not even be mapped. 

One solution is to map and assign addresses, but this takes time, money, and in some cases may not be politically desirable. For example, civil authorities may not want to map squatter camps or informal settlements because they feel it legitimises the settlement.

But that doesn't mean that those people shouldn't be able to tell someone where they are. My aim is to try to provide a location code that will work immediately, everywhere. Places with formal addresses won't have a need for such codes. For example, I live in Switzerland and it's unlikely to be useful here, with a few, mostly leisure based exceptions. But people living in say Kibera in Nairobi or Dharavi in Mumbai may find a code that gives an exact location a useful tool until formal street addresses are assigned and in widespread use.

I'm not trying to obsolete street addresses, but provide an option that works until street addresses come along.

Doug

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Serena Coetzee <serenacoetzee at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Doug,

working on ISO’s international addressing standard, the feedback we got from numerous countries was that these types of codes are interesting as grid references but not useful as addresses. There are some interesting address assignment schemes/algorithms that allow one to automate address numbering along a road. See for example, the Australian rural address (see also US mile post marker address assignment) and the Saudi Arabian addressing scheme [1], but they have limitations for a global rollout.

[1] http://www.isotc211.org/address/docs/211n3188_Review_Summary_19160_Addressing.pdf

Regards,
--
Serena Coetzee

Geography Building 3-5
Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield, 0028, South Africa
email: serena.coetzee at up.ac.za Web: www.up.ac.za/cgis
Mobile: +27 82 464 4294 · Tel: +27 12 420 3823 · Fax: +27 12 420 6385

On Oct 29, 2014, at 10:34 PM, Daniel Morissette <dmorissette at mapgears.com> wrote:

This sounds very much like the Natural Area Coding (NAC) system:

http://www.nacgeo.com/

Interesting idea in theory, but in practice this has been around for over a decade and hasn't really taken off, quite likely because an alphanumerical code is not of much more use than pure geographic coordinates.

Or maybe it's like the case of "rasters in a database" [1] and this concept just needs a strong champion to sell us the idea and convince the world that we need it?

Daniel

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-users/2006-October/013569.html

On 14-10-29 3:53 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Hi Doug,
> An interesting and potentially useful concept.
> It sounds like you are proposing a spatial standard. Have you approached
> the Open Geospatial Consortium about getting the standard endorsed?
>
> With regards to any code which you wish to produce and open source, I
> suggest considering bringing it under the umbrella of the Open Source
> Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
> Details about OSGeo incubation here:
> http://www.osgeo.org/incubator
>
>
> On 30/10/2014 1:08 am, Doug Rinckes wrote:
>> I'm an engineer at Google, and I have just open sourced a geo project
>> we've been working on for a while.
>>
>> I used to work on our maps, detecting missing road networks and in my
>> spare time mapping roads in Papua New Guinea, Central and West Africa
>> from the satellite imagery. But without street names or addresses, a
>> road network isn't all that useful. People can't use it for
>> directions, because they can't express where they want directions to.
>> After talking with colleagues from around the world, I discovered
>> that's it actually very common for streets to be unnamed.
>>
>> We thought that we should provide short codes that could be used like
>> addresses, to give the location of homes, businesses, anything. If we
>> made them usable from smartphones, we can make addresses for anywhere
>> available to anyone with a smartphone pretty much immediately.
>>
>> We had some specific requirements, including that these address codes
>> should work offline, they shouldn't spell words or include easily
>> confused characters. We wanted to be able to look at two codes and
>> tell if they are near each other, and estimate the direction and even
>> the distance. The codes should not be generated by a single provider,
>> because what do you do when they disappear? Finally, it had to be open
>> sourced.
>>
>> Open sourcing the project was important. We wanted to allow everyone
>> to evaluate it so that we don't go implementing something that turns
>> out to not be useful. If it does turn out to be useful, everyone
>> (including other mapping providers) should be able to implement it and
>> use the codes freely.
>>
>> I'm pre-announcing this to a couple of geo lists today, and I'll be
>> sticking around for comments and questions. The following links
>> provide more information:
>>
>> Github project: https://github.com/google/open-location-code
>> Demonstration website: http://plus.codes <http://plus.codes/>
>> Discussion list:
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code
>> <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/open-location-code>
>>
>> Enjoy!
>>
>> Doug
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
> --
> Cameron Shorter,
> Software and Data Solutions Manager
> LISAsoft
> Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf,
> 26 - 32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009
>
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>
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--
Daniel Morissette
T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000
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