[OSM-talk] Is it technically and legally possible to add the Open Location Code to the OSM search?

Oleksiy Muzalyev oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch
Sat Aug 11 06:02:38 UTC 2018


On 11.08.18 08:28, Martin Trautmann wrote:
> On 18-08-09 15:32, oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch wrote:
>> Open Location Codes are also referred to as "plus codes".  Since August
>> 2015, Google Maps supports plus codes in their search engine. The
>> algorithm is Open Source, licensed under the Apache License 2.0. and
>> available on GitHub [1].
> Please let me help to understand OLC: is this nothing else than another
> representation of lat and lon?
>
> This may be good enough for rural areas and small buildings. But I do
> not understand how it should work for very tall buildings.
>
> How would you proceed for those tall buildings?
>
> So how do you provide your OLC? It's the OLC of your actual location?
> And you do add the OLC for the entry to your tall building?
> (where bells or letter boxes might be located? Or is this an extra OLC?)
> And as an extra you do provide the entry to your street?
>
> And this is still a two dimensional address only? How about multilevel
> buildings?
>
> I do thing especially about tall buildings with a maze of corridors.
> You'd need a list of OLC waypoints how to find your location - within a
> building, where GPS will not work.
>
> - Martin
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
Hi Martin,

I absolutely agree with you. The OLC is not perfect. All existing 
addressing systems remind me the situation with email addresses in early 
90s. When moving to another part of a town one had to change the email 
address, because it was provided only by an ISP.

But the OLC is open source. It tries to solve the acute problem that 
more than four billion people on Earth do not have any address for 
numerous reasons: there are no street names, there are no streets, 
buildings are constructed "illegally", etc. Even in some cities with 
existing inefficient address system finding an address could be a 
daunting task. I understand perfectly well that developers in Europe and 
North America, where there is a functional legacy system, cannot grasp 
the magnitude of the problem. It is something hard to imagine without 
being implicated.

It is not only a remote problem. The resulting excessive senseless 
driving on global scale in search of a house causes additional CO2 
pollution which concerns all.

Since the OLC (plus-code) is open source there will be further efforts 
to improve it, to solve the issues which you mentioned and some others. 
Using just coordinates, however, is like writing a program in assembler, 
it is possible but less convenient than say in C++.

With best regards,

Oleksiy




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