Three words

[jufes]

On a post from "Three Words", the independent world wide location system, that they have teamed up with TomTom to integrate there systems for finding places which as it offer greater accuracy and off grid in remote areas will be a great help pinpointing locations.

 

[canderson]

"What3Words", actually.

It's a pretty strange system for location notation, assumes that people are actually capable of spelling the words that are told to them (big assumption these days!) and there's no apparent rhyme nor reason to the assignment of words. Adjacent 'cells' contain no common information. Had they gone with adjacent blocks of cells that started with the same word (rather like the beginning letters of a post code), it might have been easier for people to envision where their own nearby cells were located. Anyone from London knows that E1 is Whitechapel. Instead the entire thing seems to make every cell out of totally random words.

 

[Kex]

Late contribution to this topic, but the ONLY open source spatial referencing system today (AFAIK) is MapCode.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapcode

It was developed in 2001 by TomTom, who offered it as Open Source in 2008. Here maps also now support the standard.

Google has yet another option, but again, it’s not Open Source and Google don’t allow others to use it without sharing user data with Google. This has come to prominence recently during relief efforts in areas impacted by disasters, where normal addressing may not be available, and/or have been destroyed by an extreme weather event.