[OSM-talk] What3words

Mark Wagner mark+osm at carnildo.com
Tue Jul 12 19:07:36 UTC 2016


There are three major problems with What3Words:

1) There's no way to reduce precision.  I can say "the left front door
of the Avista central office building", but I can't say "the Avista
headquarters campus" or "downtown Spokane".

2) There's no correlation of names between adjacent locations.  The
aforementioned left front door has a totally different name from the
right front door.

3) It requires an internet connection.  If I'm out hiking and a member
of my party breaks a leg, I can't get on the radio and tell
Search & Rescue my What3Words location: my map doesn't have it (and
never will: see the precision issues), and my GPS can't display it.

In short, What3Words has solved the problem of human transmission of GPS
coordinates from one internet-connected device to another.  But they're
hyping it as if it were the ultimate solution to all your location
problems, hence the derision.

-- 
Mark

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:04:59 +0000
Jóhannes Birgir Jensson <joi at betra.is> wrote:

> I don't know if they are using the English version in Mongolia but I 
> doubt it. You can already swap to 8 other languages on their website 
> (top right option).
> 
> I did discuss Icelandic with Mapillary and they looked into available 
> word sets and concluded that it was more than sufficient to make
> Iceland itself work in an Icelandic w3w implementation.
> 
> The circle-jerk is strong here about w3w, they have a human readable 
> solution for GPS-coordinates (which OPL isn't sadly), they've pledged
> to offer the source code if their business goes belly-up and seem to
> doing a lot of good things. I'm slightly perplexed at the extent of
> vitriol they suffer here.
> 
> --JBJ
> 
> Þann 12.07.2016 08:11, Janko Mihelić reit:
> > So they are using the english version? What good does that do to the
> > local people? It would be easier to learn the GPS coordinates.
> > 
> > Janko
> > 
> > uto, 12. srp 2016. u 09:47 Steve Doerr <doerr.stephen at gmail.com>
> > napisao je:
> >   
> >> On 12/07/2016 00:23, Dave F wrote:
> >>   
> >>> This system [...] doesn't work in the real world.  
> >> 
> >> It's apparently used in Mongolia as of this month. So the proof of
> >> the
> >> pudding . . .
> >> 
> >> --
> >> Steve
> >> 
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