SnooCode: addressing and routefinding in a country without street addresses | Hacker News Reader

SnooCode: addressing and routefinding in a country without street addresses

bbc.com

23 pointsblahedo10 comments

So those rescue workers need to have network connection to find the address?

My understanding is you have to download the app, then request a code based on your location, e.g. ABC 56F, and it gets added to their database. To find the location for a code you again need the app and online access.

Well, they probably need network connection for routing and maps though with various OpenStreetMap-based apps you can pre-download offline map data.

In that regard http://what3words.com/ works better. Their codes are pre-generated, the database is a static 20MB (afaik, they keep adding languages) and the apps thus can convert the whole world offline. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/sep/22/ta...

Disclaimer: I own stock in a company that owns stock in what3words.

I guess it's probably working the same way as what3words (by the way, I hope they are going to improve their i18n version..).

By the way, I can totally confirm myself the "close to the blue bar" kind of location description in the article, I've seen this kind of things in the database a lot in my previous company.

Hmm, I guess the FAQ might just been misleading and by "requesting" the app just displays a pregenerated code for that location.

I work on geocoding (https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/) and even in industrialized countries, let's say Spain, I see address like "On kilometer 4 of autovia 5", often from real estate listings. It's a challenge to map that. Yahoo!'s geocoder/routing made progress on those queries but their API gets switched in March (long announced, not related to the expected mass-firing later today).

Even in industrialized countries like the USA, I have shipped products to "Gas Station, Small Town, Kansas". This was very hard to put into the shipping software, but finally it worked.

I spoke to the customer on the phone, and he said "You can't miss it, it's the only gas station for 20 miles" . Surprised me that it worked to get them their stuff, but I guess they do it all the time.

A lot of counties, particularly the rectangular ones, define addresses throughout the entire county by establishing a block size (like 1/8 mile), counting the number of blocks in one direction from the origin point of the county, and multiplying by 100 to get the address number.

So if state highway 50 runs north-south, in a county where the origin point is the county courthouse, and the gas station on it is 8.6 miles north of the courthouse, its address would be "6880 N Hwy 50" or "6881 N Hwy 50", depending on which side of the road it was on. If the farm supply is 9.2 miles north of the courthouse, it would be "7360 N Hwy 50".

If your road has curves, you just switch the direction letter between N, S, E, or W. Sometimes a county will set the address origin point as the southwest corner, so there are only north and east addresses.

This system of addressing owes a lot to the Jefferson grid system of the Public Land Survey System.

Kind of related, I'm really disappointed at Google Maps's inability to deal with my country's addressing scheme. We practically have two parallel systems in use: the usual street+number, and district+number. Almost without exception, the latter is used only for blocks of flats and other residential buildings built under the former communist regime. Each building only has an actual address in one of these systems, i.e. either it's directly on a street and given a number, or it's offset from the main street with a small unnamed side street going to it and given the next sequential number for the district, or it is on an actual street, but the street doesn't have numbers or a name posted. This does mean that buildings in the district+number scheme are practically plopped at random and there is no guarantee that N will be next to N+1 and sometimes a building gets an extension and the extension's number is N-A. Sometimes you have a pair of buildings planned and N-A and N-B allocated for them, but then N-B gets cancelled and you only have N-A...

Paper maps work by having a reference on the back telling you at which rough coordinates building N in district X is and our homegrown online maps simply have all the GPS coordinates for every building.

However, in Google's case, half the time it fails if I write "City, district number". It knows, say, building 219, but not 220, even though they're right next to each other. It seems to treat the entire "district number" string like a property name, like if you have a property called "the awesome steakhouse" and type "the awesome steakhouse" in maps, it shows you where the awesome steakhouse is in the city.

/rant

out of curiosity, what country is this?

Username is 'anon4' so he/she might not want to disclose the country.

I do not remember where I read it, but I think they use mapcodes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapCode

I tried the example from wikipedia on Google Maps, but it did not work. Surprised me, I expected that it would.

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