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Google's New 'Plus Codes' Are An Open Source, Global Alternative To Street Addresses (9to5google.com)
Google has developed a "simple and consistent addressing system that works across India and globally." Called "Plus Codes," the location-based digital addressing system is designed for people with addresses that are not easily located through conventional descriptors like street names or house numbers. That's half of the world's urban population, according to a World Bank estimate. 9to5Google reports: Notably, this open source solution composed of 10 characters works globally and can be incorporated by other products and platforms for free, with a developer page available here. It works offline and on print when overlaid as a grid on existing maps. Places that are close together share similar plus codes, while the system is identifiable by the "+" symbol in every address. "This system is based on dividing the geographical surface of the Earth into tiny 'tiled areas,' attributing a unique code to each of them," reports Google. "This code simply comprises a '6-character + City' format that can be generated, shared and searched by anyone -- all that's needed is Google Maps on a smartphone."
The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters -- about the size of one half of a basketball court. The area code is not needed when navigating within a town, while another optional character can be appended to provide additional accuracy down to a 3 x 3 meter region. Users of Google Maps in India will be able to easily find the plus code for any area in the app, while the mapping service along with Search will support the entry of the new coordinate system. Plus codes for any location can also be found with this tool.
The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters -- about the size of one half of a basketball court. The area code is not needed when navigating within a town, while another optional character can be appended to provide additional accuracy down to a 3 x 3 meter region. Users of Google Maps in India will be able to easily find the plus code for any area in the app, while the mapping service along with Search will support the entry of the new coordinate system. Plus codes for any location can also be found with this tool.
So they reinvented the Maidenhead locator system.
3x3m is your average NYC apartment or Indian slum house, you also need to encode elevation and room/apartment numbers in many cases since you could have your code shared by many tenants both in the same plane as well as vertically.
Also, encode up to 1x1m if this is going to be useful for any modern delivery methods (eg robot truck or drone).
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Google developed the Open Location Code in 2014, and it's been part of Google Maps since 2015...
...very like What3Words then, which is already used by the postal services of seven countries ...
Oblig. XKCD reference
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First obvious reference would be the UTM map coordinate system which also works off 100x100 km squares, here we use 6, 8, 10 or even more digits to designate any spot on the globe, to any desired accuracy/precision. (6 digits typically give you 100x100m squares, 8 digits 10x10m and with 10 digits you have a single square meter.) This system have been used in the military for a _long_ time now.
Next we have the What3Words idea which have already been mentioned, giving approximately 3x3m resolution using 3 english-language words which makes it much easier to memorize or send to someone else.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Street addresses work when there is a street to address.
In some countries, the streets literally have no name - Japan springs to mind. In Japan, the blocks have names and the streets are just the space between the blocks. Asking someone what street they live on is the same as asking someone here what is the name of the block you live on? Then the numbers sometimes go in order around the block, except there are often gaps where two properties have been merged, or numbers out of order where one property has been subdivided. In other countries, there are no streets. There are paths, there are tracks, but there may not be a street with a name.
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A quick run through wolfram alpha converting gps coordinates to base 36
4z.zzz = 179.999978
4z.zzy = 179.999957
Difference = 0.000021 degrees
At the equator, 1 degree = 111320m longitude and 110575m latitude (based on a quick google) which makes the 5 digit base36 encoded gps coordinates accurate to within a 2.5m x 2.5m box at the equator, and a much smaller box closer to the poles.
That's within the 3m x 3m area that google's new thingo does. Drop the decimal (or base-36al) points, and you have your character string.
Disagree. What3Words is proprietary. Something like this needs to be open source really. And whilst w3w may have the advantage of being easily remembered, you cannot tell whether two addresses are close-by. I also don't think it works well across languages as every location has a different name in different languages - the words are not translated but completely different words are used in different languages.
Adresses are used for more than people to drive to. Adresses are used to send packages to people. Adresses can be PO boxes and can include apprtment numbers, so there is a difference between a person who lives on the 2nd floor and somebody on the 3rd floor. There are plenty of places where the code will be useless and an adress will be needed.
Besides meaning a location, in many places an adress is also a legal part of other things, like the location of an address. You can not just replace the adress with a pluscode on your legal company letters in many countries.
Then there are the places that not even HAVE an address, so there is nothing to replace.
What it is is an alternative to the Geographic coordinate system
This does not mean it is a bad thing or useless, but it is NOT an alternative to adresses. If anything it complements it, not replaces it.
And then there is Geocoding that started in 1960.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Japan has addresses, they just aren't street addresses. But they work and are unique, and unless you are a web form developer who thinks the whole world has middle names, states and zip codes, no problem that needs solving exists. They just have a different system.
Many countries have their own variations of systems. Whether street numbers are sequential or even/odd divided upon the two sides. If different entrances to the same building get different numbers, or an entrance designator (e.g. in Vienna you very often get a street address like Somestreet 5/2 where the /2 indicates the 2nd entrance).
This system and its competitors were invented to address your second situation - where no streets exist. That could be geographical (villages clustered around a central point but without streets per se) or circumstancial (slums with no official streets existing) or for any other kind of reason (that old castle on the mountain which is now a Hotel).
I honestly have no idea why they invented a system for that. We already can give the coordinates of any point on Earth with any amount of precision that you need. Sure, VXX7+39 might be slightly shorter than 38.8973,-77.0364 - but it doesn't give me information, for example how far away QXW5+38 is. 38.8039,-77.022 does.
But all that is besides the point. Cities are not just their geography. Many large buildings, for example, have one official entrance for the public to use. The geography of the building doesn't tell you that. The street address does. And many buildings have their doors close to the next buildings entrance, I know several examples where they can both easily fall within the same 3x3m square. Street address makes it clear.
A street address also tells me (if I know the numbering system) which end of a street I need to start at. Here in Vienna, for example,6CJ8+QV and 7FGH+6M are on the same street. The Plus codes gives you no useful information whatsoever. With the street address you can take one look at the nearest building and understand which direction and about how far away each of these destinations is if you are somewhere on that street.
So as a real-life navigation system, zero usefulness.
As a coordinate system, weaker than the ones we already have.
Plus (pun intended) you need access to Google Maps to figure out your current location in Plus Code. But every smartphone will tell you your GPS coordinates, doesn't even need a working network.
Even after checking their Benefits page I still fail to see any advantage whatsoever.
what3words at least has the benefit of memorability.
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After spending a significant amount of time in Korea and Portugal I applaud this because some people simply do not know where they live. Sure they can give shitty directions like head south on the roundabout where Tonyâ(TM)s restaurant (which of course has no signage) then go down a ways and take a left but donâ(TM)t even know the name of their street or building number. Thank you google now roll this shit out globally asap
Japanese addresses are almost useless for locating a building unless you have the neighborhood's map at hand: Because the numbers are assigned more or less chronologically, standing in front of Naninani-ku 1-3-1 does not mean you are anywhere near Naninani-ku 1-4-1. Unless you're in one of the places that uses a different system, which may be more systematic for coarse locations but not much more helpful for building locations.
"Plus Codes" are just a radix-20 method for expressing latitude and longitude. If you know how far away 38.8039,-77.022 is, that is only because you have a lot of practice using that notation. A "ten digit" Plus Code (which is 11 characters long because they add that plus sign) has resolution of 0.000125 degrees in both latitude and longitude, so it gives more precise location than your 15-character string.
Overall, I would say that Google devised Plus Codes because they didn't know about MGRS, or wanted to make something quasi-proprietary. It is weird that they spend so much space complaining about other lat/long-based locating systems without applying the same rules to Plus Codes.
W3W's major drawbacks are that it is proprietary and that it needs a huge database to translate locations. A minor drawback is that it breaks down at sea.
This is much better than the Irish eircode system...
With eircode, each dwelling get's their own 'postcode'. This means that in an apartment block, each individual apartment has it's own postcode. Which is nice.
But... they went to great strides to ensure that your neighbours have a completely different eircode. The codes are 'random' in order to ensure this. So it means that if someone sends you something but they wrote the code down marginally incorrect, your package will be delivered to someone several km away and not to your neighbours.
It also means that you need to either have (and have to buy) a copy of the ever-updating database locally, or have online access in order to lookup the eircode to see where you are going. And if you need to look up many of them, they'll charge you.
*sigh*
At least Google added them to maps. But they aren't a very well thought out system. This Plus system makes a lot more sense.
So, it's yet another rectangular grid system. They have their uses, but street addresses are not one of those uses, and the areas where it is useful already have their own grid systems.
A long string of letters and numbers is not easily memorised. There's no mnemonic aspect to it. We're wasting a lot of bandwidth since a large number of grids exist entirely in the ocean, and we get a huge number in the arctic and antarctic despite the very low population density in these regions. Regions by the borders of larger blocks have completely different codes from their neighbours (unless they reverse alternating rectangles, but I don't think they are). There's no recognition even of what country someone is in.
Street address systems need to be human based. Streets are human creations. We think in terms of countries and cities, and streets. And there are several working implementations of these, each with their own pros and cons.
google just reinvented what the military has done for decades. they even have math equations to convert grids to GPS coordinates and back the other way
Since all the characters contribute to the address, there is no redundancy. So just like with phone numbers calling the wrong person, an incorrect character will send your stuff (or visitors) to the wrong place. Possibly even to the wrong continent if one of the early characters is mistaken.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
https://plus.codes/ show it's really 12m x 15m
Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.
And that gives Google access to essentially everything on your smartphone (as I just discovered when trying to shut down some unwanted apps.)
Google Maps itself claims it only needs permission for "your location". Reasonable, you'd think.
But disable Google Play Services and Google Maps starts complaining about how it "won't work unless you enable" it. So it has an unannounced (until you break it) proprietary pipe to the other app.
Google Play Services wants permissions for:
- Body Sensors,
- Calendar,
- Camera,
- Contacts,
- Microphone,
- Phone,
- SMS, and
- Storage
(and you EXPECT it to be "phoning home" to google.) Combine that with Maps' permission to
- your location
and you've got quite the collection of information on you that you've just given Google's app framework permission to report to Google and/or modify.
Seems to me the android Apps -> Permissions interface, by not calling out the other apps that a given app communicates with, along with THEIR permissions, nor refusing an app permission to talk to another with additional permissions, is deceptive and gives false confidence.
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