
Show HN: Give 7 billion people a physical address - roberdam
http://locationawarenames.org/
======
wuliwong
I don't think I'm on board with this. Here are two names from the same street:

NOZAXO-JEJEZU, NUZAXOJ-JAJEZUN and here's one from another location in the
city PABAXO-GAKEZU. First, I wouldn't like to prominently use these names on
my business as I would be naming them nearly the same as any other one on my
street. Second, it is not clear at a glance that the second address is in the
same area. And without specifically saying "Atlanta" you lose all types of
information about taxes, police, fire and other government type things which
apply to areas bound by complex curves in lat-lon space.

Here's three other addresses: BAJASU-BONEXO, DAFASU-DUTEXON, LIDEJA-KESERO

Two of these are about 10 miles apart and the other is thousands of miles
away. I can see some similarities to the ones close by but if just given a
single UBI name, I doubt I'd have any clue where it is. It seems that actually
seeing lat-lon numbers might make it easier to see that locations are close
together.

This is also ignoring streets, which carve complex paths through lat-lon
space. I'm not sure if the street name is wrapped up in these UBI names but
losing that information would be terrible for locals or honestly anyone else
traveling. If you know something is on "broad st." and you are on broad st.,
then you can follow the road to get there. If you are looking for NUZAXOJ-
JAJEZUN and you are at NOZAXO-JEJEZU, you may not realize that you are on the
same street.

I didn't go through the entire set of slides as it was pretty onerous, some
having 7 clicks to reveal everything in them. I think I got the basic idea
though and I don't really see a use case for this replacing any part of our
current system. I would never name a business using these. They are unnatural
and difficult to pronounce, so I'm not sure how the "Pine Hill" example is
valid. Adding these to existing addresses would be useful, in the sense that
adding lat-lon to an existing address would be useful but I don't find them
more readable than lat-lon. And the UBIs have the negative effect of needing
to be translated to lat-lon in order to find locations.

~~~
drostie
That is the big take-home problem here. I looked up the address that they said
was in Nigeria (it's actually in Mali), REJATE-POKAJA. I wanted to know,
"well, what's the address of the building across the road?" and it turns out
that that is: RIJATE-PIKAJAS. I think my first thought is, "Is that really
what you want?" Those sound pretty darn similar, and it'd be easy to get
confused. In reality you already have a lot of info about a place implicitly,
so you want to focus on the stuff that you don't know, magnifying that to
cover the whole number.

It seems that they get something like 16-20 bits per word or so. I think my
first approach in this case would be to feed lat/long through a cylindrical
equal-area projection, since the math for those is pretty simple (so it can be
implemented in diverse systems easily) and at least there is a semblance of
fairness to the resulting numbers -- but really, I think what you want is to
cover the Earth with a massive geodesic dome of points and just number the
vertices with some algorithm, perhaps placing a great circle on the Greenwich
line and then descending around in some sort of spiral. There's no fundamental
reason I can see why we'd need to project at all, really.

So, you form two numbers with the Gall-Peters projection:

    
    
        2^9 * (most significant 9 bits of x) + most significant 9 bits of y
        2^9 * (least significant 9 bits of x) + least significant 9 bits of y
    

or else you label each of 2^18 geodesic faces in a spiral and do coordinates
on the faces; either way.

You take these numbers, and multiply them by some large prime, modulo the
number that you've got. Prime multiplication is a simple way to permute the
numbers so that adjacent vertices are unlikely to be numbered similarly. If
you really wanted, you could then XOR it with some fixed pattern and multiply
by another large prime, which may help with names being similar at the poles
themselves or something (depending on the size of the prime). Any quasi-random
permutation will work, I just figure "let's take the ones that are only a
couple fixed lines of code." The nice thing about these permutations, too, is
that they're invertible: someone gives you a name, you convert it to a number,
you pass it back through this, and you get map/geodesic coordinates.

Then you convert _those_ numbers into syllables. This way you can know that
your city is mostly DAFAXO except the northeastern part is part of LINUZU,
completely different names. The most significant bits are thus scrambled but
isolated. The least significant bits are scrambled separately and give every
point on the ground a wildly different name, so that nobody confuses your
place with one down the street.

~~~
roberdam
Hi Drostie, It is an excellent analysis, when designing the algorithm there
are 2 choices, to make the Global Addresses somehow related, so you can know
that REJATE-POKAJA is near RIJATE-PIKAJAS, or to make them totally different
so you wont get confused by the similarity, both approaches have their
advantages and disadvantages , and as you say, is not something difficult to
implement

------
zheshishei
This system doesn't (currently) solve the problem it was created to solve,
which is to create a system that can uniquely encode locations that also
produces phonetically coherent names. The problem is, by encoding the location
so precisely in each name, you leave no leeway in the speaker's pronunciation.

Different languages have different sets of phonemes. For instance, in
Japanese, "L" and "R" are allophones, meaning native speakers consider the
sounds to be the same. So, take these two UBI's:

[http://ubicate.me/NALADU-MAMOKE](http://ubicate.me/NALADU-MAMOKE)

[http://ubicate.me/NARADU-MAMOKE](http://ubicate.me/NARADU-MAMOKE)

Smack dab in the middle of Tokyo, about 15 minutes apart from each other.

Also, this would require speakers having the same vowel
distribution/phonological rules. I pronounce "PACASU-FADERO" and "PACASU-
FEDERO" pretty similarly. Relying on letters that are only different in
voicing is also risky. For instance, take "P" and "B". It's easy to mistake
"PACASU-BATERO" for "PACASU-PATERO".

Finally, street names have an advantage over UBI's. Street names are usually
formed from words in the inhabitants' native language, so they sound more
natural and will of course be easier to pronounce.

~~~
roberdam
Hi heshishei Thanks for your comments , Im Robert the developer behind the
idea.

I totally agree with you in that there is no way a single algorithm can
produce pleasent result in every language, what sounds fairly good in Italian
or Afrikaan might sound illegible in Japanese.

But even then, might be a little easier to send a SMS saying "Meet me at
NALADU-MAMOKE" than "Meet me at 35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E ".

If the resulting name does not work for you as name you might want to use, see
it as a tool available to handle easier "35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E "

>Finally, street names have an advantage over UBI's. Street names are usually
formed from words in the inhabitants' native language, so they sound more
natural and will of course be easier to pronounce.

You can use Location Aware Street Names, using not generated names, but words
in your language that form street names, like "Doctor Stifus" for example, and
using street numbers on it, so you can say I live at "Doctor Stifus 50" so
your address will be "Doctor Stifus 50@gazado-fifene"

I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a
"Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, there you can check the Street
Names concept.

------
not_that_noob
Place names have huge emotional content associated with them. Place names are
changed for example to honor a person (Washinton, DC) or an important concept
(Union City, CA). There's something very human and basic about that mapping
between place names and our identities.

I think this is an innovative idea you propose, but because it runs against
the grain of what it means to be human, it may not receive the uptake you
would like.

~~~
roberdam
Hi not_that_noob Thanks for the comments!.

I certainly agree with you, but you dont have to replace the names you are
already using to take advantage of this, you can say:

    
    
        not_that_noob
        Washington Ave 123
        Washington DC
        BIFAPU-BATEDU
    

Floods, tornadoes, tsunamis and natural disasters can wipe out landmarks and
leave addresses or conventional signaling unusable , that last line can make
all the difference in such situations since it remains always unalterable.

And then you have Location Aware Street Names, where you can use words in your
language to form street names, so you might use words that are more cultural
meaningful to us.

------
anon4
Those aren't names, those are random jumbles of letters that are somewhat
pronounceable. They might be also hard to localise for places that don't use
English words.

A name is a word with a long tradition of being used as a name, or sounding
really close to one.

Perhaps a better idea would be to use 3-4 word names like "Third Rainy Pine
Hill" where you have a large dictionary of words that can be strung together
and you can translate them in different languages.

~~~
somewhatoff
You mean, like [http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/) ? I really
like the idea.

------
al2o3cr
"50% of people in developing countries live in places where there are no maps,
addresses or street names, UBI gives them an immediate alternative for their
needs."

Because _everybody 's_ got a device that has GPS and can decode these opaque
strings, right? /facepalm

~~~
axiak
More people in India have a cell phone than have access to a toilet.

~~~
lightblade
True, but does those feature phones have GPS?

~~~
petrosh
no need, once adopted we'll change all the signs on every street and every
building.

------
MrDosu
Its a nice little thought experiment, but current place names have been
optimized for human memory. Objects, names, events are all synaptically linked
to enable the average human to master a relatively complex set of locations.
The provided system also completely excludes cultural background (also
important for how "good" a location name is for a given person). tl;dr:
Systems like this already exist (e.g. longitude/lattitude). The proposed
system is on the same usability scale for individuals like existing systems.
Does not improve anything.

~~~
roberdam
Thanks for your comments MrDosu, I definitely agree with you, but the Location
Aware Names concept can be used to take language and cultural factors into
account , to create a reference that is indistinguible from any other non
Location Aware Name , fast forward to slide 47 and let me know if that answer
your comments!

~~~
MrDosu
Why would a town that historically has not needed street names have a need for
convulated "street ids"? Small towns like this dont have street names because
they are superfluous. Mail arrives, people find places.

------
tehwalrus
This seems like a good suggestion for a global system of Postcodes (Zipcodes).

As others have mentioned, lots of other _human readable_ info is stored in a
traditional address, so this really won't do as a replacement, but as a "line
at the end of an address" that works anywhere in the world it's pretty cool.

(the advantage it has over the straight geo coordinates is obviously that it
is pronounceable, and hopefully easier to remember.)

~~~
roberdam
That's right tehwalrus, you don't need to replace current location systems if
they work for you, but you can use it as an aditional line to gain accuracy
and resiliency

------
egypturnash
The example phonetic address they use for a bunch of examples is "RERI-NUCA".
Not very memorable.

And what happens if you misspell it? The example of spelling "Pine Hill" as
"Pine Hil" is easy for a human to see and correct; would I be able to realize
that "RERY-NOOCA" was a typo?

These are also utterly useless for navigating without GPS. Even if we assume
that all maps are replaced with ones that have this letter-based coordinate
system as their grid, I still can't see it being easy to give directions, or
to navigate without a phone.

How does this work for languages that do not use Roman characters?

There is a scheme for creating "street names" in this (though it doesn't seem
to handle streets that turn). However these names are all pretty much
gibberish names. And naming all streets this way would remove the local
character of place names - a Los Angeles street name has a different character
from a New Orleans street name, and a Parisian street name has a stranger one
yet.

I dunno. It's moderately clever but it doesn't really feel like it's designed
for human-scale interactions.

~~~
wuliwong
100% agreed. In Atlanta, we name all our streets some version of "Peachtree".
Definitely gives a feel to the place. Doesn't help navigating so much, but
whatevs. :) In Philadelphia, we have an area called the "tree streets," for
Chestnut St., Walnut St., etc. Just can't see that stuff going away.

------
michaelt
How does this compare to [http://www.mapcode.com/](http://www.mapcode.com/)
and [http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/) ?

And how does one achieve the sort of critical mass where the average person on
the street knows their own home location?

~~~
mattbee
I like what3words - it's about as good as you can get for the same goofy idea.
Those ubicate names are shorter but ... ugly. I like that my data centre is at
*fish.wages.jelly but not TACEGE-CARAFAN.

If I'd heard my office name over the phone using the ubicate system I might
instead head for [http://ubicate.me/TACEGE-CARAVAN](http://ubicate.me/TACEGE-
CARAVAN) ... which looks to be about 30 miles off the coast of Holland, not on
the York ring road :-)

So I get the idea, but this algorithm produces awful names.

what3words noticed that you needs less than 1800 words to assign a combination
of 3 words to every square meter on earth, so those words can be chosen to be
different from each other, unambiguous, common etc. Still ENGLISH and not very
international, but it's a much better idea.

~~~
terravion
Totally agree, What3words is way better for communication. But even there, if
you read me the locator, I have no idea where the location is. With
traditional addresses, I have a good idea of where things are, and how I might
get there, just by hearing the address, the same is true with lat/lon or MGRS
to a lesser extent. This system means I need a device to figure out where
anything is.

This whole idea seems like a variation on "the world would be better if only
it was run by computer logic" (where better = more orderly and machine
readable). For whatever reason, other considerations (cultural affinity,
convenience in a daily context, etc.) seem to be more important to most
people.

------
jmspring
Knuckle dragging, likely down voted...but dear god, online equivalent of
powerpoint...whatever happened to writing a paper to describe your idea? Yes
you can download as a pptx or a pdf, but slides really don't always convey the
whole message.

This is a general rant around this rather popular method of sharing
presentations.

~~~
colinbartlett
I came to the comments to the understand what this is because I gave up on the
slide show after a minute of furiously clicking NEXT.

~~~
jmspring
Pretty much every such similar presentation that get's linked to, I do the
same thing. I really miss the days where a paper usually preceded a talk. But
different times...

Having to hit "next" to have to step through the additions to a particular
slide is the worst.

------
michaelq
My humble advice for this slide deck is: get to the demo. In this case, it's
phonetically encoded coordinates. It's a cool idea, but requires adoption of a
"majors system" like system for converting numbers into sounds. That's asking
a lot!

~~~
roberdam
Thanks for the advice michaelq, I will change the slide to get to the rel life
apps first and explain the concept later!. What do you mean by "major
system"?, could you explain more?.

The idea is to use what we already have now, "Names" but encoding information
inside them, if you get to the Location Aware Street Names slides, you can see
how it can be used to make some very interesting stuff, fast forward to slide
55.

~~~
yeukhon
Also when you publish a presentation it is really better off just give the
non-animated version (even the pdf version with 4 pages to just load from pic
1 - pic 4 is still not a good idea).

Just my 2 cents.

~~~
roberdam
I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a
"Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, hope that improves the
experience!.

------
bhouston
Neat idea, but things that become really successful slipstream into the
existing way of doing things, rarely do they supplant it in such a radical
way. If the US can not even change to the metric system, think how hard this
will be to adopt.

Maybe a chance in third world countries, but then you need to partner with all
major online map makers to make this the default or a prominent identifier in
all their softwares.

------
corry
Seems like the easiest metaphor for this is "DNS for GPS" \- i.e. in the same
way DNS translates IP addresses into something human-readable, this translates
lat-long into something easy to remember and work with.

~~~
wuliwong
I disagree. No algorithm connects google.com to whatever IP Address it is
associated with.

In this case, there is a one-to-one correlation. Functionally it is somewhat
similar, but you could figure out the location of one of these crazy names by
running through a simple algorithm, locally. You don't need to make requests
to a remote server, to do the DNS lookup.

I would also disagree that these "names" are easy to remember. :) They are
pretty random. I doubt these names follow any of the "rules" that human
language does, either. They are mapped to a system of numbers. Human languages
share some common rules and organization, I believe.

~~~
fluidcruft
You could apply the algorithm to IP quads. But I agree, it's barely better
than Base58. It's like "BasePhoneme" or something.

~~~
wuliwong
I'm not sure what you mean by applying the algorithm to IP quads? If you give
me the name "google.com", there is no algorithm I can apply which yields the
IP address, correct? Because that IP address could be reassigned to a
different name, right? The only way I can make the connection is to do a DNS
lookup, which I thought is essentially just searching a database for
"google.com" and returning me the corresponding IP address.

------
ajb
This is a clever idea, but I don't think it will fly; at least not in most
places.

Human phonemes exist in a continuous N-dimensional space. There are two
problems to defining a universal phonetic set: 1) different populations use
different areas of the space. For example, some cultures use hardly any
vowels, some hardly any consonants. 2) different populations quantize the
space at different boundaries. So even two cultures who both have 5 vowels may
find that what is unambiguously 'e' in one culture is 'a' or 'e' in another.
And those are just the major problems. The usual solution is to have a set of
glyphs that the are labeled in a locally distinguishable way. We have those -
digits.

------
pidg
Could make some classic songs interesting...

"I found my thrill / on MARAMUT-GACIRA"

"JODEGE-SIFAJAR is in my ears and in my eyes"

"JACEGE-RURAJA forever"

------
davidgerard
You realise that in the UK, an address is completely specified by house number
and postcode? Nine characters max.

~~~
DanBC
> Nine characters max

Post code is max 7 characters. People could live at number 123, which is over
9 characters. Or they could live at a flat and house number - flat 1, number
12. Which is again over 9 characters.

~~~
shawabawa3
So 10 characters max. Actually 11 because I think you could have 123a

You should never have to specify more than 1 number. If you have to say flat
1, number 12 the post office needs to assign you a new number (e.g. 12a).

Still beats the hell out of MARAMUT-GACIRA, especially as post codes give a
lot of information (I know instantly whether a postcode is in or outside
London, and if inside roughly where)

~~~
frobozz
Instantly, that's impressive? I can only manage that if you define London as
"The area covered by the London compass-direction based postal districts" If
you choose either "governed by a London Borough Council", or "Within the M25"
or "Within the City of London", I'd have to look it up.

The postcode district states which sorting office delivers to the address,
leading to upmarket Windsor having a Slough postcode SL5

EC1A - inside The City; EC1M - outside The City.

EN1 - in a London Borough; EN10 - In a Hertfordshire borough.

KT9 - Inside M25 and in a London Borough; KT11 Inside M25 and in a Surrey
borough.

~~~
shawabawa3
Maybe not for everything, and i'm sure there are loads of technicalities on
the edge of london.

But for your examples:

EC1A and EC1M are both in or around the city

EN1 is enfield I think? So far north, EN10 I imagine is just further north

KT9 I think is Kingston. Both KT9 and KT11 are probably south west near the
edge of london

> I can only manage that if you define London as "The area covered by the
> London compass-direction based postal districts"

That's actually basically what I meant. Compass postcode = london, non-compass
is effectively outside london (or on the very edge)

Either way, the point that post codes carry a lot more information than codes
generated from GPS coordinates still stands

------
roberdam
Here can try the concept [http://ubicate.me/](http://ubicate.me/)

~~~
lotsofmangos
BTW, you have written _hole_ instead of _whole_ in the line _' This simple
step opens the gates to a hole range of new possibilities and innovations'_.

~~~
roberdam
Thanks lotsofmangos!, typo corrected

------
aftbit
Looks pretty similar to MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) and/or
Maidenhead Locators. Yeah, this proposal produces names which are
pronounceable (in English), but that's the only advantage I see.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

------
boomlinde
"Pine Hill" is excellent information if the parties involved agree on what it
means.

You can say that it's meaningless to a person that doesn't, but in a context
where everyone does you can't argue that it's "low quality information". In
the same sense, totally disregarding that people sometimes share a cultural
heritage, personal history or conversational context and use this to their
advantage, "Yes" or "No" would be really awful information. _Nothing_ is a
good conveyor of information by itself.

What does BAJASU-BONEXO say about anything before I stuff it into a computer
that arbitrarily translate it to a set of coordinates (an existing system
invented to solve the same problem)? If everyone needs a device to decode it,
what advantage does it have over just sharing the coordinates?

With 1 meter granularity, what prevents people from assigning different names
to what is essentially the same place, in a way that potentially prevents
either of the hundreds of thousands of names generated for a 1 km^2 Pine Hill
from ever catching on?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a neat idea. Turning coordinates into
pronounceable words means that you could easily share an exact location over a
phone line. It's just that I think that it's arrogant to say that the
tradition of naming places is somehow inferior to what essentially is a
totally different thing. To present them as something that is meant to replace
an "old algorithm" (referring to a practice that is mostly non-algorithmic) is
big-headed and geographically and culturally ignorant.

------
roberdam
Thanks for all the feedback, I was not expecting so many responses!

The main idea behind the concept of Location Aware Names is to re-think the
way we give name to places, from a information point of view.

Is there a better way to use names as an information unit? can we improve the
current "algorithm" that we use to name places?: I think so.

It will replace the current way we name them?: I dont think so.

Is UBI the best use of Location Aware Names?: Hopefully not!, UBI is a proof
of concept of the idea, maybe you can come up with something much better.

Is using RERI-NUCA better than the Street & Number: Maybe not if you already
have your street and number location on a map , but is one step forward from
65° 42' N,170° 35' 60.0'' W

Actual names are made from words in the inhabitants native language, UBI names
are odd: The Location Aware Names concept can be used to take language and
cultural factors into account ,and create a references like "Doctor Stifus" or
"Isaac Nousol" that are indistinguible from any other non Location Aware Names
(see slide 43)

It will be very hard to adopt: Of course, but it can start as simple as an
option to encode from the current
[http://goo.gl/maps/EdGCc](http://goo.gl/maps/EdGCc) on google to
[http://goo.gl/maps/FULABOS-LUNETE](http://goo.gl/maps/FULABOS-LUNETE)

The idea of Location Aware Names is to add a different set of options to our
current way of see and use names, with their advantages and disadvantages

------
nicoch
There is a very important convention hidden in this method: it relies on the
GPS (WGS84) geodetic system in order to encode names.

The thing is, geodetic systems, WGS84 and others, are an approximation, that
is mostly invisible since maps are also in WGS84. The problem only appears
when you try to convert between geodetic systems. When you convert your
coordinates, the errors from the approximation might not be the same between
your two geodetic systems, to correct those approximation you need an
intermediate model, which depends on local topography, and that can be
calculated only when observing directly that topography.

So, if for some reason, we have to abandon GPS for another localization
system, this naming convention will be likely to load to wrong physical
locations when coordinates will be derived from names. Then we will need to
build those local models globally, and rely on them forever, or rename
everything, or rely on human memory to rebuild maps just like the ones we
have, but with the legacy of those encoded names, far worse to remember the
the ones we already have.

------
frobozz
A few comments:

0: How does the street algorithm work?

1: Not everywhere can effectively be described as a point with varying degrees
of precision. Some places are long and thin. How do I tell my friend that I'll
be somewhere along a certain meandering river, but not the adjacent canal?

2: Dumb IDs are good, they are stable, and even if they happen to contain some
kind of hint, no one is relying on the hint and can still use them. How do you
account for tectonics? Dammit! an earthquake! I'll need to tell everyone my
new address!

3: Internationalisation. RERI-NUCA and GASAVI-CALILO will be difficult or
impossible for some, if not most literate local residents of those places.

Even if legible, some sequences may be phonologically incompatible with the
language spoken in the area. Therefore, you'd ideally want different versions
of the algorithm for different natural languages. This might then require the
addition of another datum to denote the algorithm used, so that I don't get
lost going to en:RERI-NUCA when I'm supposed to be going to pt:RERI-NUCA.

~~~
roberdam
Thanks for your comments frobozz,

>0: How does the street algorithm work?

I will publish the algorithm hopefully next week on the website as public
domain

> 1: Not everywhere can effectively be described as a point with varying
> degrees of precision. Some places are long and thin. How do I tell my friend
> that I'll be somewhere along a certain meandering river, but not the
> adjacent canal?

At the time you can also describe streets , or lines on space with Location
Aware Street Names.

>2: Dumb IDs are good, they are stable, and even if they happen to contain
some kind of hint, no one is relying on the hint and can still use them. How
do you account for tectonics? Dammit! an earthquake! I'll need to tell
everyone my new address!

You are right, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis and natural disasters can wipe out
landmarks and leave addresses or conventional signaling unusable , Location
Aware Names remains always unalterable.

>3: Internationalisation. RERI-NUCA and GASAVI-CALILO will be difficult or
impossible for some, if not most literate local residents of those places.

I totally agree with you in that there is no way a single algorithm can
produce pleasent result in every language, what sounds fairly good in Italian
or Afrikaan might sound illegible in Japanese.

But even then, might be a little easier to send a SMS saying "Meet me at
NALADU-MAMOKE" than "Meet me at 35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E ".

If the resulting name does not work for you as name you might want to use, see
it as a tool available to handle easier "35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E "

The idea of different versions of the algorithm for different languages is
something worth of researching.

------
ceejayoz
I'd be concerned that locations like "NELA-GAZA" would be confusing, as Gaza
is a real place.

~~~
u124556
I was thinking some of the names will probably offend people in some language.

------
ttty
First problems:

\- Nearby places have very simillar names; Just changes one letter "U" with
"O"

------
daemonk
You would still need another line for multi-story buildings. For example, I
live on the 2nd floor of a building. On google maps, my flat is located above
a restaurant. I guess I would have to write "apartment 3" before the ubicate
address.

~~~
wuliwong
Good point.

------
superasn
This is a rather wonderful concept. English names are good but often when
names in another language are converted into English and typed into Google
maps they can be spelled many different ways, .e.g. "Dwarka Mor" or "Dwarika
Mod" or "Dwarika Mode" or 10 different other combinations (which Google maps
using Google suggest can fix thankfully)

But how does this handle misspellings? Not sure if it already has it but there
should be CRC check in the first or last letter to make sure the address
printed misspelled a C instead of a G.

~~~
roberdam
Great idea superasn, right now if the misspell result in an invalid address it
will let you know, but you can make a mistake that result in a valid address
anyway.

------
plesner
What's the algorithm for mapping between locations and names? If I wanted to
integrate this into my own code how would I do that -- is there a library?

Coincidentally I published a post about almost exactly the same thing only a
few hours ago, [http://h14s.p5r.org/2014/09/z-quads-
strings.html](http://h14s.p5r.org/2014/09/z-quads-strings.html). But it
focuses more on the algorithmic side which is why I'm curious about the
mechanics of UBIs.

~~~
roberdam
plesner, I will publish the algorithm next week on the website as public
domain, your algorithm is very well explained and maybe even better than mine,
basically your approach is using Z-Quads and my current algorithm encode the
actual Gps Lat/Long into names.

------
XorNot
How resilient is this type of encoding? i.e. if I pronounce this to someone
over the phone, they may write down the phonetics incorrectly or with a
different take on the spelling.

What happens if they do that?

I see a lot of names depending on consonant-E and consonant-A pairs, but in
the English language how you pronounce those sounds can wind up being very
similar dependent on context.

~~~
wuliwong
Yes, I absolutely agree. Several of the addresses I encoded would be easy to
mistake via voice which is why I thought the "Pine Hill" example very poor.

------
mcintyre1994
This is a neat experiment but how important to the concept is it that these
named areas are circular? I'm thinking that it'd be illogical to lose naming
of streets because that's exactly how our physical world is laid out - but you
can't accurately do that with circles.

------
rusew
The slides are really cool – there's a lot of depth. I was really impressed
that vectors could be encapsulated in names, removing the need for street
information to be stored. Can the system encode non-linear vectors, i.e. curvy
streets?

~~~
roberdam
Thanks rusew! , at the time I was able to encode points and street names
(lines) , hopefully more complex non-linear vector can be also encoded into
short name forms.

------
lclarkmichalek
Esperanto for maps

------
petrosh
That's a fantastic idea, phonetic is not important now, this is a code, then
you can customize algorithm later for example more language/layers.

This should be started for people names too, stop silly names and lets put
some genetic into.

~~~
roberdam
Thanks Petrosh!,

That's the idea, to start thinking about names and how can be improved,
Location Aware Names is just a starting point not a final product.

------
joshuaheard
This seems like a great idea. You have points and lines (streets). What about
areas? For instance, real estate lots. It would be great to replace
undecipherable legal descriptions or platting schemes with your system.

~~~
roberdam
Thanks Joshuaheard

you can use zones for that, but at the time works for circular areas, try
RERI-NUCA 800

------
dudus
I'm concerned my street and the street next to me are very similarly named. I
suppose this can be confusing in the long run as similar places will have
similar names.

~~~
tehwalrus
it might work better as a more chaotic (two-way) hash function, true - next
door streets different by at least half the letters, or something. Or at least
with a prefix for the higher-significance bits, like "town", and a suffix for
the lower significance bits, like "street".

------
axilmar
I'd prefer plain lat-lon coordinates over this any day.

------
itsnotvalid
All I can think of this idea is, just like internet time.

------
joshdance
Like the thought experiment. One note is the fade in animations slow things
down when you are trying to move rapidly thru the slides.

~~~
roberdam
I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a
"Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, hope that improves the
experience!.

------
franciscop
Why don't we try first to get the International System of Units going
worldwide? (;

------
chomp
Isn't this basically how autopilot waypoints are handled?

------
grigio
it seems to me a longer version of geohash
[http://geohash.meteor.com/](http://geohash.meteor.com/)

------
131hn
Is the API/ algorythme available somewhere ?

~~~
roberdam
working on it, hopefully next week will be published on the site.

------
skynetv2
RERI-NUKA is so much better than Pine Hill?

------
sriku
Don't like this one. mapcode.com ftw.

------
petrosh
Any interest to open this on GitHub?

------
EGreg
Sounds like geohashing

~~~
wuliwong
Yea, it seems this is a 50 slide presentation to try to justify it.

------
sgy
A ".org" CIA project?

