[OSGeo-Discuss] Short codes for locations

[Robert Cheetham]

Doug,

This is really interesting work.  Thanks for sharing with the OSGeo
community.

Robert

------------------
Robert Cheetham

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On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 10:08 AM, Doug Rinckes <drinckes at google.com> 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
> Discussion list:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Doug
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
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>
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