
Giving Everyone in the World an Address - tomohawk
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32444811
======
mauvehaus
I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of
the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique
names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to
navigate to it.

The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it
identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices
are well-known.

I'll grant that within any locality, people generally know how to get from
point A to point B (and frequently don't know the names of the streets), but
it seems like what you really need is a way to map the unique 3m squares onto
that knowledge.

Even with that problem solved, another problem comes up with planning
deliveries efficiently. There's no information embedded in the what3words
address that encodes any notion of adjacency or relative distance. I realize
that this is probably intentional to reduce the likelihood of errors in
addresses going unnoticed, but it means determining nearness requires access
to the whole mapping data set (or at least enough to determine that a
what3words address isn't in the set of ones you care about).

~~~
abstractbeliefs
Those squares can be mapped back to regular lat/long and navigated by regular
GPS/SatNav.

I guess the main thing here is that we can now express "GPS coordinates" in
easy to remember and human-friendly phrases.

~~~
maemre
That is partially done with Geohash
([http://geohash.org/](http://geohash.org/)) and other variants. The actual
step here is usage of dictionary words as digits for encoding instead of a
bunch of random characters.

Alternatively, such a system can be done by interleaving bitstrings for
coordinates then converting the result to base 10000 or something and encoding
each digit with a word. By using that you will get a little bit of hierarchy
(the coordinates starting with same digits will correspond to sequences
starting with same word). In this way we will know which zone starts with e.g.
chocolate.kit.photo then it will be easier to navigate. Of course it won't
beat a graph-based solution like street and building numbers.

------
Flip-per
First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's
biggest hits. "It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic
rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either
remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of
delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones
that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it
mildly.

~~~
mauricemir
quite this is first worlders trying to nickle and dime poor third world
country's

Access to clean water and basic medical services will do far more.

~~~
Kluny
Well, if you ever try providing clean water and medical services to one of
these places, you will quickly find that your first challenge is distributing
resources in an efficient, non-wasteful way.

And to do that, you need to take a census and find out how many people live in
each area, how many are lacking service, and to what extent.

And to do that, you need to have some way of counting people that both humans
and computers can understand. Which brings us back to this very elegant
address system.

------
grecy
I recently learned that Northern Canada has this problem.

Most of the communities in the Arctic do not have street names. Canada Post
has been forcing them in the last few years to start, so, for example, a
community called Aklavik officially has one street, Aklv St. Even though there
are physically more streets than that, and streets at right angles, they're
all called Aklv St.

I work for the telco that services these communities, and it's hilarious to
look at the street addresses in our plant and provisioning systems - addresses
are literally "brown bld across from red bld", "House near lake" etc.

Not surprisingly, I'm having trouble writing code to parse street addresses :)

~~~
bliti
Oh, classic address trap. I feel for you, my friend. It makes you wonder about
introducing a new address system that takes into account your actual location
in the globe (with GPS). Not a trivial undertaking itself. I assume it has
been thought off before. Anyone have more info on this type of setup?

~~~
FroshKiller
Mapcode was a submission a while back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052908)

------
Doctor_Fegg
Usual disclaimer for what3words: neat idea, shame the data/algorithm is
closed.

In the Rio example, a postal service or courier would have to pay w3w to
license the words->lat/lon lookup before they could deliver anything.

~~~
billpg
I imagine, from their point of view, that's the point.

~~~
Animats
Which is a big problem. They want to own the address of most of the people in
the world. They might get away with it, too; their word list can be
copyrighted.

------
kw71
I have to think "ugh" when I read about this idea. Random three words to every
square seems like chaos to me.

These also take a lot of bytes to store. In the US, every address or "delivery
point" can be represented by 11 numerals: zip+4+2. If you read the barcodes on
your received US mail, you will see the normally invisible +2. (zip+4 is
usually granular to one side of a block or MDU mailbox cluster, and the extra
two numerals represent a unique mailbox within the zip+4.)

Amateur radio people have organized the world into grid squares, which are a
bit larger as they are minutes of latitude/longitude in either dimension.
However they are like postcodes, in that once you are familiar with the system
you can glance at one and have a rough idea of whether it is near you or not,
and where on the map it is. For instance, the White House in Washington is
within grid square FM18lv.

Introduction to the grid square system at [1] and a rudimentary mapping tool
at [2].

I'm not sure if there is any reason why the grid squares couldn't be further
subdivided. Even then, this wouldn't solve the problem in some places I've
been: The barrios around Caracas are not only tightly packed in two
dimensions, but they have been building their homes on top of each other, so a
3m x 3m square could very well contain five homes or more.

[1]: [http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares](http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares) [2]:
[http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper](http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper)

------
cabirum
I still prefer Geohash
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash)

It's already implemented in mongo, elastic, solr, etc, supports arbitrary
length/precision codes, adjacent cells have similar hashes.
[http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html](http://www.movable-
type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html) [http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial-
prefix-tree/](http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial-prefix-tree/)

~~~
pjkundert
Geohash is great, but doesn't include any error detection or correction. This
means that one (undetectable) symbol changes, and you could be half-way around
the world from the original Geohash location.

The EZCOD encoding provides accuracy within 3 meters AND error
detection/correction with 10 symbols. For example, where my daughter was born:
R3U 1JU QUY.0 (try it at [http://ezcod.com](http://ezcod.com))

If you want 20mm accuracy AND 5-nines certainty of correctness, you can have
that in 15 symbols: R3U 1JU QUY L02.XJ8

Available in C++, Javascript (via Emscripten, production-ready and CDN
hosted), Python (via Swig) and REST APIs:

[http://hardconsulting.com/products/13-reed-
solomon#EZCOD](http://hardconsulting.com/products/13-reed-solomon#EZCOD)

[https://github.com/pjkundert/ezpwd-reed-
solomon](https://github.com/pjkundert/ezpwd-reed-solomon)

[http://ezcod.com](http://ezcod.com)

Use EZCOD for free. Forever. For whatever application you want. Available
under either GPLv3 or completely free Commercial licensing, at your
preference.

------
cheleby
Nice idea but there is also sacrifice of the relativity of the places. Based
on the calculations, looks like the order of the words are important too.

"With 40,000 dictionary words, you have 64 trillion combinations, and there
are 57 trillion squares."

If the dictionary words can be doubled, the order of the words can be made
unimportant too. That way it would have ~80 Trillion combinations (64
Trillion/3!) * 2^3.

------
tokenadult
Discussion of the company's own website from three months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198)

------
wnkrshm
One critical issue in this (apart from the proprietary approach) might be the
mapping of adresses between languages, since a random Indian or Chinese person
will probably not benefit from English words.

Can you identify subsets consisting of 10,000s of words in different languages
that have one-to-one maps to any other global language subset for w3w? (i.e.
without multiple words being suitable for a translation of the word)

------
coherentpony
> Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names ...

I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have
singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but
it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.

If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a
square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort
angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x
3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you
increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to
this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern
hemisphere as well.

~~~
saraid216
That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to
remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me
that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes
38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions.

As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

~~~
anamexis
24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.

~~~
saraid216
Dammit. I thought I had been careful enough to get the correct number.

Alright. Picking the simplest formula off Wikipedia, cosine of 85 degrees is
~0.0871557 times _a_ (6378137m) times pi is ~1746383.9m for the circumference.
That's still approximately 500k squares at the exact latitude. My point is one
of the sheer magnitude still available.

What I should do is calculate how many decimal points down from 90 degrees 3
meters is and get _that_ circumference, since that's the low bound, but I'm
not really feeling up to the number-plugging.

I could be incorrect about what _a_ is; I presumed it is the semi-major axis
on WGS84, but I might have picked the wrong thing.

...

Ooh. I forgot there's a Wolfram|Alpha. ... And 10 minutes later I haven't
convinced the input parsing to give me what I want. Oh well.

------
amolgupta
discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198)
earlier

------
circlingthesun
How about retrofitting DNS to do this? Encode a persons GPS coordinates in a
TXT record. Now instead of writing my address on an envelope, I write
me.example.com. The mailman/post office can then look up someone's coordinates
via a DNS query. The benefit of this is that when I move, I can simply update
my DNS entry. I could either host my own address or 3rd party could. Local
government could grid up their own regions and assign address to fixed
locations. You could choose to CNAME your address to the government allocated
address or use the government issued one for the plot.

~~~
kfnic
There is already a LOC Resource Record type defined by RFC 1876[1] that can be
used to represent location data.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1876](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1876)

------
droithomme
This article is clearly placed by the guy featured in it whose company is
promoting an alternative to street addresses.

The article incorrectly states that people without street addresses have no
postman and can not get mail.

This is not the case at all. I've lived in many places throughout the world
without street addresses. Mail is delivered to addresses consisting of the
person's name and things such as their village, precinct or neighborhood.

The articles assumption and promotion of non-factual claims as true suggests
the author and the company simply do not know what they are talking about.

------
akoumjian
I lived in Saipan for a few months, part of the CNMI. A couple decades ago
they attempted assigning road names and addresses, but what you find is that
almost no one uses them. They don't have a postal delivery infrastructure, so
those who can afford it get private company PO Boxes (the official PO boxes
are extremely limited).

To me it seems like the real challenge is funding and setting up a postal
infrastructure. Creating 'addresses' of any scheme would emerge organically
out of necessity from that.

------
Zigurd
This seems as behind-the-curve as printing out email and delivering it to
physical mailboxes. As long as you can accept delivery of electronic
documents, nobody should care where you "reside." If you need to take delivery
of goods, you can specify a designee for that purpose, as and where needed.

------
yosito
An imprecise, centralized, English-centric system for labeling the planet. Why
not just use GPS coordinates? It's much more universal, distributed and
precise.

------
critico1
"Interestingly, he says what3words has not had to market itself intensively"

Really? Don't they have connections with Ogilvy and Mather?

------
bane
Coming from a country with a working, comprehensive, addressing system, I
never understood how special this was until I started extensively traveling.
It's kind of mind-boggling how unique of an invention addresses are and yet
how simple they are.

It requires only two things

\- give an identifier to each road, numbers are perfectly fine (the scheme
isn't even all that important)

\- each property plot along a given road gets an incrementing number, plots
with multiple housing units are given some kind of subdivider (Apartment,
Unit, etc.). This works best with oddly numbered properties on one side and
evenly numbered properties on the other.

So long as you use unique identifiers, you don't even need states, counties,
zip codes or other administrative districts -- though this makes things easier
-- all you need to know if the block of property numbers the address lives in.

An alternate approach is to simply subdivide a territory into smaller and
smaller zones until you get to a small enough spot on the planet that you've
uniquely identified a plot of land or a building or whatever. I believe Korean
addresses used to use something like this but are slowly moving on to a mixed
mode system like the U.S. uses (subdivide areas, then use street names and
numbers).

It's also seems absolutely insane that the concept of an address, or parts of
an address can be some kind of Intellectual Property that a company holds some
kind of right to. My understanding is that this used to be a significant
problem with addressing in the U.K. and remains one in Ireland. The last time
I visited Ireland, outside of the cities, addresses were give to us as
Lat,Long coordinates! Absolute insanity.

I remember trying to send a package to a friend in rural England once, the
address was something like "The Yellow Home behind the Red Barn, Essex, U.K.".
It took 8 weeks to arrive, I have no idea how much of that was spent by the
Royal Mail matching color swatches and building combinations.

It's an interesting notion that we couple postal service to addresses. In some
places, like Dubai, they are decoupled and the post only makes its way to a
P.O. Box, not to a residence -- which of course have no address, and end up
with descriptions like "Building ABC Behind the Market, off of the Second
Exit, 2 Lefts and a Right after entry" which is necessary for non-government
postal services like Fedex. Oddly, this system makes a kind of sense in the
Internet age, unless you actually have to get somewhere.

In some countries, local landmarks and these sorts of quasi-turn-by-turn
directions-as-addresses are the norm. Oddly, they often persist long after
what they describe is gone. "The Red House behind the Temple" might be
somebody's address, but the Temple fell during an Earthquake 20 years before
and the house is no longer Red. The claim is that the local postman has enough
local knowledge to make this work, but there's so many obvious failure modes
to make this sort of "system" seem absurd.

If you look back long enough, the U.S. didn't _always_ have a useful system.
Old Revolutionary War era advertisements look like the kinds of semi-useless
addresses you see elsewhere. Addresses definitely appears to be product of
cities, but it's useful when it's used on a national scheme. It's so simple
and so absurdly effective, it's always seemed bizarre to me that it's just not
universal.

This proposal is interesting, but ultimately a bad idea. Correct addressing
encodes both a unique location _and_ navigation way points.

Take a U.S. address:

1234 Main St. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Beverly Hills, CA is honestly not necessary, but does make it human readable,
90210 tells you this location is out west and the post office has a map that
subdivides it even more to a specific delivery zone.

There's hopefully only one Main St. in that zip code, and the building is on
the 1200 block of that street on the even side. When you arrive there, it
should have "1234" on the building and the street signs should tell you that
you are on the correct street.

A better proposal is perhaps to use a subdividing system. The world is split
into N "squares" and each of those is split into N "squares" and each of those
into N and so on until you're at a fine resolution. A simple map lookup for
"Fred-Berry-Fred-Cow" would get you to within a few meters of wherever. The
military uses versions of such a system (MGRS, UTM, etc.) and without
electronic aids you can pretty quickly find pretty much any place on the
planet within a few moments.

[http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins-
pennsyl...](http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins-pennsylvania-
gazette/)

~~~
mintone
I'd agree with you to some extent but postcodes (the UK equivalent of ZIP
codes) were actually introduced before ZIP was in the US. If you were given an
address in 'rural England' like that at any point in the past >40 years then
it was most likely the addressees choice rather than the actual postal system.
The postcode also makes everything apart from the number irrelevant in the
eyes of the post office - you can address items to 10, GL10 2AB and it will
end up where it needs to go.

~~~
bane
> it was most likely the addressees choice

That's good to know. I believe there was a post code (this exchange happened
about 10 years ago). I recall there's been several interesting exchanges over
rights access to the postal code locations in the U.K. as internet mapping
started to become more prevalent. I think this finally changes ~2009/2010? At
least it finally happened, but I cannot fathom the thought process that would
have made a campaign necessary to force the release of basic location data.

