https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

Alternatively, try a W3W parody:

https://what3emojis.com/

http://www.what3fucks.com (NSFW text)

Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.

From another W3W-criticism blog post (https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html):

“An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores.

“If you have a powerful computer in your pocket, and you want to use your brain to remember and then use your voice or a text message to share a geographic location with someone else who also has a powerful pocket computer, what3words has got you covered. If you want to infer how far that location is from another location, or which roads might connect to it, you are out of luck. Building an addressing system is difficult, expensive work specifically because legitimate addresses embed so many levels of hierarchical categories and scalar proportions for us. Remembering coordinate locations is cognitively burdensome, but the signifiers retain some meaning relative to one another. You can tell the search and rescue team that you’ve twisted your ankle at ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you’ve moved 3 meters east, you’re at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic crutch has exhausted its usefulness. Augmenting one cognitive task in a manner that debilitates the constellation of surrounding faculties is not the right way to apply technology to our problems.”

No need even for the data connection. Any Android 2.3.7+ or iOS 11.3+ phone will automatically SMS the location when the emergency number is dialled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location

While it might initially seem a bit easier to remember words vs numbers, W3W is a non-solution in many ways, many nicely described in the article.

Most critically, the W3W indicators have zero relation to actual geography. Adjacent locations have entirely different quasi-random identifiers -- there is no progressive gradation, and no indication whether two locations are adjacent or on different continents.

It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and their servers to navigate.

There is also no way to figure it out from known principles. The entire system has many points of failure. With a street address, I can know which way to from seeing a couple of existing addresses; W3W - no way, need a data connection.

With Lat-Long I immediately know what part of the world I'm in, and what direction I need to move to move to get closer to my target. A GPS unit, or a simple compass and map will work great. W3W -- zero clues, and need a data connection to them.

Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem.

Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA .

The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.

There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.

A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless.

Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.

>Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

That's "suspect" in the sense of "guess" (as a verb), not in the sense of a criminal suspect. (And "stocked" like a store shelf would be)

I'd call this example entirely benign.

However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around.

Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.

I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:

•Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original.

•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.

•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear.

•Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.

•Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes.

Watch this space.

For instance, based on advertising from the ACS (American Chemical Society, the largest scientific organization in the world by membership), you would expect they are advocates of collaboration among chemists. In reality they will sue anyone that tries to store or distribute their standard for chemical identifier numbers (CAS#).

At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume. No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right?

What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.".

Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat.

Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"

They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: https://xn--ls8h.la/)

* actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items

Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items.

I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable.

With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a helpful solution to that.

Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely.

For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of the bay area.

If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell database.

(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)

This other thing seems more opportunistic / financially motivated / kinda scummy too.

I also wonder about the Streisand Effect here, never heard of it until now. This almost seems like standards geek / nerd bait...

And why three words? You only need two, unless you're coding altitude. And damn, you already have two numbers (angles) with arbitrary precision.

And how does one calculate great-circle distances using their silly words?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

Would you mind expanding on that? This topic piqued my interest because I've recently found myself using Geohashes to lookup nearby objects and I'm wondering if there's something better that I should be doing.

> With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.

Topologically speaking, I am intrigued :)

The "S2" geometry system (http://s2geometry.io/) is what Google Maps and many other large systems use. It has a small bias towards the poles in terms of some S2 cells being slightly larger than others at the extremes but the bias is pretty minimal.

Another system, Uber's H3 (https://eng.uber.com/h3/), handles this problem in an even better way, although it loses some of the benefits of S2, such as having fine-grained cells no longer exactly fitting into their parent cells. It has other benefits however.

One thing missing from all of these system, including W3W, is that none of them have a height component. If I go to a party in a strange condo and need to call for an ambulance, there is a huge difference between being on the first floor and the fiftieth floor of the same building and W3W does nothing to solve this problem.

Then instead of sending them a shortened link to something, you just put the link on your page and tell them there's a new link for them there.

That would also make it easy for students who want to go back and review older links you sent. Instead of digging through prior announcements to find the right one, they could just go to your links page.

That, in itself, renders them hopelessly confusing.

I mean, imagine a domain name system like that. There'd be no domains and subdomains. Just a bunch of random names.

[1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696

Also don't discount the benefit of their distribution of the words. If you're using voice input and trying to get somewhere, the system can guess which of multiple inputs you mean. If you're in Louisville Kentucky you're more likely to be trying to get to "captain.water.water" (a ~90 minute drive from downtown) than "captains.water.water" (located on an island in the North Atlantic). Do you have a mechanism (maybe a check digit?) to help with that?

Is "angry ape alligator" right next door or in Europe? No idea. Which fire station do we relay a call to? I don't know, let's ask w3w servers (during an emergency ... )

To the precision that I want to get someone to help me when I'm trapped in a car, you really only need a few significant digits of lat/lon (.YYYY/.ZZZZ) will get you to within 1 km most of the time. The left-of-decimal numbers are not needed if you are calling local 911, as an increment there shifts by a hundred km.

Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?

There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage.

Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember.

So I'm watching ;)

This represents my disappointment as well. When I initially heard of the system, I thought it was hierarchical; the first word describing some larger chunk, the second describing a chunk within that chunk, and the third describing the 10' x 10' block nested at the bottom. That would have been a fairly cool thing; you could easily go for less precision in order to represent a larger space -- your neighborhood, for instance. Instead, it just feels entirely non-intuitive for a system that seems to have been created to offer mnemonic names for spaces.

Perhaps there are technological limitations to the problem that I can't see that prevent a hierarchical solution from being possible or feasible. But I just see little value in an 'addressing' system where one cell's address is totally unrelated to the cells adjoining it.

edit: I've just found w3w's justifications for a non-hierarchical system on their site and they seem weak to me, but who knows, I'm no expert on the matter. -- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207768985-W...

It's supposedly beneficial when trying to locate a particular person. They can just send you their W3W, the car can read it off the SMS, and automatically provide routing.

I have not used the capability, but explored it when I first got the car since I had never heard of W3W.