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from the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY dept.
When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.
One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.
However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.
The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.
what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.
Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.
Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.
Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.
People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.
The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)
There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.
Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Monday November 02 2015, @07:02PM
One mis-spelling or even get the words in the wrong order, and you can be anywhere on the planet.
It is important to understand the difference between how humans memorize numbers and words. Numbers rarely have an association, unless they just happen to match some other sequence or object that you remember. Words are all about associations. Humans will remember not literal words, but their meanings, their images. When recalled, instead of "limbs.pinning.honk" they will recall something else, something similar - perhaps involving monks who allow themselves too much freedom with their extremities. As it is essential to recall the name exactly, you lose everything if you misremember. Even the lat/lon coordinates don't have such a problem - if you need a place at 33.456N and 27.123E, you can start with 33N and 27E and ask around :-) However when you are at the "pimps.beeping.conk," after three days of air travel, you cannot really do much there if in reality you needed "blimps.pegging.wonk"... and there is no checksum even to make sure that the combination of words makes sense.
If humans start getting flooded with senseless 3-word combos, they will all mix up in their memory. It's worse than useless. This is why hierarchical locators are so much in use (country, city, street, building, person.)
It is also important to consider the language. As the system has to be universal and work on the entire planet, it has to be understood by everyone. However there are many scripts and languages on this Earth. Some scripts cannot even encode those words; some readers cannot even read them; and some can read but do not understand the words. (Not that understanding is needed - but without an association those words are just long random tokens.) This problem had been solved by postal systems a long time ago. You can write the country (and, if you wish, the city) in English, and the rest of the address can be in local language - once the letter gets there, the postman will understand what address you want, no matter how the local street numbering system works. In Russia, for example, there is a street, and there is a house number... but that number can belong to several different physical buildings! They are then numbered on another level, under the house, with numbers or letters. The postman knows every delivery location in the area and will have no problem. But try to write that address in a foreign language - terms are essential (дом, корпус, строение) but translation of those is hard, as they mean nearly the same thing.