
SnooCode: addressing and routefinding in a country without street addresses - blahedo
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35385636
======
mtmail
So those rescue workers need to have network connection to find the address?

My understanding is you have to download the app, then request a code based on
your location, e.g. ABC 56F, and it gets added to their database. To find the
location for a code you again need the app and online access.

Well, they probably need network connection for routing and maps though with
various OpenStreetMap-based apps you can pre-download offline map data.

In that regard [http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/) works better.
Their codes are pre-generated, the database is a static 20MB (afaik, they keep
adding languages) and the apps thus can convert the whole world offline.
[http://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2015/sep/22/ta...](http://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2015/sep/22/tanzania-smartphone-apps-africa-fastest-growing-city-
dar-es-salaam-map)

Disclaimer: I own stock in a company that owns stock in what3words.

~~~
realusername
I guess it's probably working the same way as what3words (by the way, I hope
they are going to improve their i18n version..).

By the way, I can totally confirm myself the "close to the blue bar" kind of
location description in the article, I've seen this kind of things in the
database a lot in my previous company.

~~~
mtmail
Hmm, I guess the FAQ might just been misleading and by "requesting" the app
just displays a pregenerated code for that location.

I work on geocoding
([https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/](https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/)) and
even in industrialized countries, let's say Spain, I see address like "On
kilometer 4 of autovia 5", often from real estate listings. It's a challenge
to map that. Yahoo!'s geocoder/routing made progress on those queries but
their API gets switched in March (long announced, not related to the expected
mass-firing later today).

~~~
gregpilling
Even in industrialized countries like the USA, I have shipped products to "Gas
Station, Small Town, Kansas". This was very hard to put into the shipping
software, but finally it worked.

I spoke to the customer on the phone, and he said "You can't miss it, it's the
only gas station for 20 miles" . Surprised me that it worked to get them their
stuff, but I guess they do it all the time.

~~~
logfromblammo
A lot of counties, particularly the rectangular ones, define addresses
throughout the entire county by establishing a block size (like 1/8 mile),
counting the number of blocks in one direction from the origin point of the
county, and multiplying by 100 to get the address number.

So if state highway 50 runs north-south, in a county where the origin point is
the county courthouse, and the gas station on it is 8.6 miles north of the
courthouse, its address would be "6880 N Hwy 50" or "6881 N Hwy 50", depending
on which side of the road it was on. If the farm supply is 9.2 miles north of
the courthouse, it would be "7360 N Hwy 50".

If your road has curves, you just switch the direction letter between N, S, E,
or W. Sometimes a county will set the address origin point as the southwest
corner, so there are only north and east addresses.

This system of addressing owes a lot to the Jefferson grid system of the
Public Land Survey System.

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anon4
Kind of related, I'm really disappointed at Google Maps's inability to deal
with my country's addressing scheme. We practically have two parallel systems
in use: the usual street+number, and district+number. Almost without
exception, the latter is used only for blocks of flats and other residential
buildings built under the former communist regime. Each building only has an
actual address in one of these systems, i.e. either it's directly on a street
and given a number, or it's offset from the main street with a small unnamed
side street going to it and given the next sequential number for the district,
or it is on an actual street, but the street doesn't have numbers or a name
posted. This does mean that buildings in the district+number scheme are
practically plopped at random and there is no guarantee that N will be next to
N+1 and sometimes a building gets an extension and the extension's number is
N-A. Sometimes you have a pair of buildings planned and N-A and N-B allocated
for them, but then N-B gets cancelled and you only have N-A...

Paper maps work by having a reference on the back telling you at which rough
coordinates building N in district X is and our homegrown online maps simply
have all the GPS coordinates for every building.

However, in Google's case, half the time it fails if I write "City, district
number". It knows, say, building 219, but not 220, even though they're right
next to each other. It seems to treat the entire "district number" string like
a property name, like if you have a property called "the awesome steakhouse"
and type "the awesome steakhouse" in maps, it shows you where the awesome
steakhouse is in the city.

/rant

~~~
freyfogle
out of curiosity, what country is this?

~~~
mtmail
Username is 'anon4' so he/she might not want to disclose the country.

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somberi
I do not remember where I read it, but I think they use mapcodes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapCode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapCode)

~~~
gregpilling
I tried the example from wikipedia on Google Maps, but it did not work.
Surprised me, I expected that it would.

