[OSM-talk] What3words

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 3:10 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Or in the case of the traveling salesman/field service engineer scenario, I
couldn't tell you where head.butt.teakettle is but give me a street address
within about 50-70 miles of Tulsa or Oklahoma City's address origins and I
can get you to within about a mile of that location and know which side of
the road to be looking on straight off the top of my head, even if I've
never been there before.  And if it's an unnamed county road or a section
line I happen to know the name of, I don't even need a map.
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