[OSGeo-Discuss] Short codes for locations

[Doug Rinckes]

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
Discussion list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code

Enjoy!

Doug
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