[OSM-talk] What3words

[Colin Smale]

Hi Daniel, 

I didn't actually say there was any point in putting it in OSM, I just
said "w3w exists, what could/should we do?" 

You argument about being able to derive the w3w from the geometry is
valid, but requires the use of the proprietary API. But as you mention
their resolution is 3m, and I have seen discussions where people point
out that their house falls into multiple squares so there is not a
single translation from a building to w3w. People choose which w3w to
publish as "their location." An adjacent square has a completely
different w3w, so a human can't just visually assess whether it is close
or just plain wrong. An address may have multiple phone numbers, and the
inhabitants choose which one to publish; typically that one gets into
contact:phone=* in OSM. 

IF anyone wants to put their w3w into OSM, I don't think that would be
sufficiently wrong to require the data to be removed, even if the
concept is causing some raised eyebrows at the moment. 

By the way, just to be absolutely clear, I am not thinking of w3w as a
coordinate system in OSM, but as an addressing attribute similar to
postcodes. 

--colin 

On 2015-11-22 14:52, Daniel Kastl wrote: 

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> Hi Colin,
> 
> Beside the different opinions about proprietary and closed technology,
> what is the point to add these 3 words as a tag? I don't really
> understand the benefit, because the relation between location
> (coordinates) and their address system is fixed. It's just a 3x3m grid.
> 
> In OSM every object has a geometry and you can query the w3w address
> just using their API. So I don't see the point where it makes sense to
> add such an address tag. It's like you add "latlon" as a tag.
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> 
> On 22/11/15 22:37, Colin Smale wrote: 
> 
> Andy, you are right, if you accept that the 3 or 4 people who have 
> participated in this discussion are representative of OSM at large.
> But the most active inhabitants of this list and others are limited
> to maybe 10 people, who frequently use authoritative-sounding
> language like "we are not doing it" and "it has no place in OSM"
> without the merest hint of "IMHO". I am not naming any names, and I
> don't want to get into any personal arguments, but it is a general
> frustration I have with the discussions on these lists.
> 
> There may be many arguments against w3w in OSM, but I was kind of
> hoping that some of the attacks would also apply objectively to
> other entities which are or are not mapped in OSM. On-the-ground
> visibility was mentioned, and that is spurious in the sense that
> there are many other things in OSM which are not visible and are
> yet tolerated. Being proprietary was mentioned, but it is not
> really much more proprietary than the coordinates of UK postcodes
> used to be, and we were happily reverse-engineering them and adding
> them to point addresses and deriving district boundaries from that
> data. Through all that effort the proprietary nature (and the
> commercial value) of the PAF was to some extent diluted, and now a
> lot of this information is publicly available. Only time will tell
> if w3w takes off commercially. Right now they have had $5m of
> funding and have an impressive list of partners.
> 
> --colin
> 
> On 2015-11-22 14:01, ajt1047 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> On 22/11/2015 12:51, Colin Smale wrote: 
> 
> ...and once again, as seems to be the norm in OSM, any
> minority interest which is not supported by the oligarchy gets
> mercilessly shot down.
> 
> ... except it's not _just_ the "oligarchy", is it?  No-one on
> this list seems to have a good word for the original idea.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Andy (SomeoneElse)
> 
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