Saturday, March 8, 2014

what3words - A Plan To Replace Geographic Coordinates on Earth With Unique Strings of Three Words

"You cannot convey anything more effectively than with words. They're very quick to say, and have a very high verification rate," says Chris Sheldrick, CEO of what3words, the British startup that's out to replace numbers with words in the way we talk about locations. "Right now, over the phone, I could tell you 'knife.fork.spoon,' you could put that into what3words and it would give you one specific three-by-three meter square." (Incidentally, it's in North London.)

His company argues that the alternatives—reading out a pair of numerical geographical coordinates with roughly eight digits of latitude and longitude and minutes and seconds, or using normal postal addresses—are both more difficult and less accurate. To make life easier, they provide word-based coordinates for anyone to use in describing locations around the world.

Sheldrick first got the idea when he was working in event logistics and constantly experiencing the difficulty in getting people to arrive a precise location with only a postal address, often needing to add additional instructions (which unmarked turn to take, which gate to enter, and so on). "I just thought there must be some better system," he says. "Our technology is great, but the information we're feeding into it—in terms of addresses—is not really optimized."

He and friends wanted to exploit the precision of geographic coordinates, but encode them in a more user-friendly interface. They considered using language, and calculated that if they used three-word combinations for each location, and a vocabulary of 40,000 words in total, they'd be able to generate about 57 trillion unique identifiers—enough to cover the whole planet in three-by-three meter squares.


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