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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