[HOT] Open Location Code

Blake Girardot bgirardot at gmail.com
Mon Aug 13 03:56:17 UTC 2018


On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 2:43 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> So you could use them as postcode equivalents.  Is any statistical data
> available associated with an area?  Such as population etc?  The area used
> to collect the data might be a better choice.
>
> Cheerio John

I would not say postcode equivalents.

But for sure it makes research and stats easier because it is easy to
scale up or down the grid size and the OLC numbers get shorter when
you scale up.

And because so many structures are in more than one 10 code size grid
square, even tiny changes to the location of the building (like
mapping and updating with better aligned imagery) will change its
"address" as the building centroid shifts when the building is moved
of course. So it is important that the location codes are near each
other because I see the smallest squares, the 10 digit address size,
changing to any one of about 4 "olc addresses" for at least 1/2 of the
buildings, if the building is moved at all, so you will end up with
"outdated" 10 digit addresses, but luckily you will still be within
13m of the new one.

Two of the best reasons why this is the best open source option available.

Cheers
blake

>
> On Sun, 12 Aug 2018, 1:20 pm Blake Girardot, <bgirardot at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For anyone that would like to visualize that the Open Location Code
>> grid looks like, I took some screen shots of it overlayed with some
>> imagery.
>>
>> The smallest squares in the examples each have a 10 character OLC
>> number/letter code. You will notice like every grid, the real world is
>> not on a grid and many structures are in more than one grid. (Every
>> grid system has this problem).
>>
>> The next up larger size of square is the square for an 8 character OLC
>> number/letter code. It obviously groups a lot more buildings together,
>> almost the small village scale, but again, they will usually be part
>> in two, just like a structure.
>>
>> Anyway, thought folks who like to see things visualized in some way to
>> help understand them might benefit from looking at what exactly we are
>> talking about.
>>
>> I would like to see a way to have a better, more informative grid in
>> all our tools, so like a TMS layer or support in OpenLayers or leaflet
>> or something. The grid is based on WGS84 degrees already so anything
>> that helps draw a graticule can just be adapted to have different
>> major lines and list the shortened OLC instead of the degrees.
>>
>> https://twitter.com/BlakeGirardot/status/1028689726088388609
>>
>> Cheers
>> blake
>>
>> Cheers
>> blake
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 2:55 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Open Location Code or Plus code is just a method of representing
>> > latitude
>> > and longitude in a more human friendly way.
>> >
>> > It was originally created by Google but has been released under an open
>> > licence.
>> >
>> > It is possible to set osmand to show coordinates as OLC.  This means it
>> > can
>> > display the OLC code for any node or building in OpenStreetMap and the
>> > displayed code can be copied to the clipboard.  No extra tagging is
>> > necessary.
>> >
>> > OSMand will also accept an OLC code for searching purposes.
>> >
>> > It would seem likely that Nominatim will allow searching by OLC in the
>> > near
>> > future.
>> >
>> > Translation is this allows us to give every dwelling in Africa etc its
>> > own
>> > address.  It is not in itself a complete addressing solution since it
>> > doesn't handle things like 2nd floor but it does at least take you to
>> > the
>> > building.
>> >
>> > To make this work will require training material for example how to turn
>> > it
>> > on in OSMand.  It is not turned on by default.
>> >
>> > Because it is calculated from the buildings's latitude and longitude it
>> > is
>> > embedded in OSM and will not disappear.  It is stable so you can build
>> > on
>> > it.
>> >
>> > Now you need to think about how it can be used and what additional
>> > resources
>> > will be required to make full use of it.
>> >
>> > Cheerio John
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > HOT at openstreetmap.org
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>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ----------------------------------------------------
>> Blake Girardot
>> OSM Wiki - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Bgirardot
>> HOTOSM Member - https://hotosm.org/users/blake_girardot
>> skype: jblakegirardot



-- 
----------------------------------------------------
Blake Girardot
OSM Wiki - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Bgirardot
HOTOSM Member - https://hotosm.org/users/blake_girardot
skype: jblakegirardot



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