[OSM-talk] What3words

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2015-11-24 8:54 GMT+01:00 Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl>:

> I think their idea is that you can quote a location with the words which
> for humans is much easier to memorize and less prone to mishearing over
> dodgy phone and radio links than lat/lon or some other scientific grid
> reference.



yes, but it has a lot of other disadvantages, e.g. the fact that you can't
know anything about the location without their API: you can't see from the
3 words where approximately a place is, and therefore you also can't see
which 3-word-combinations are close to each other and which are far.
Traditional addressing works much better for these situations where you
already know something of the city, e.g. you can bet that Downing Street 11
is not too far away from Downing Street 10. Imagine a postman having to
deliver a bag of letters with only 3-word addresses on them. He'd very
likely need some kind of device and look up all of them rather than knowing
them by heart.

Cheers,
Martin
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