What3words divides the world into squares, each with a unique three-word address
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
* earthquakes and the like _shift locations_ on the crust. The "w3w" address you had for your house isn't at that "w3w" address anymore since that last big quake. Reprint stationery?
* no translation between the English w3w and the Spanish, French, Italian, what-have-you. They're different words altogether. No back and forth.
* It's not open
* if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates, too. As a bonus, they don't need a data connection to do that...
See also: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...
Open Location Codes (in Google Maps, for instance) seem to solve all of these problems except for not having arguably memorable words. It also doesn't change in line with earthquakes or other shifts, though I would argue that's a benefit more than a drawback.
You can even omit the first few most significant digits by listing the municipality (where those exist) making it somewhat compatible with existing political divisions.
In places with poor addressing, I regularly have to send Google Maps location links, and this provides an open alternative that can be easily transferred onto paper or spoken through a telephone.
In other words, your example would hold true if they heard and remembered the three words correctly in the wrong order, but that's not a gamble I'd want to take particularly if the API to check codes is restricted.
Not arguing your other points (in fact, I agree), but if you have the app installed on your phone, you do not need a data connection to find your current w3w address.
"Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port.
The port had over 20,000 containers and we knew that we needed to get to them quickly," said the force's control room supervisor Paul Redshaw.
The group were told to download the app and they were soon found.
There is no doubt in my mind that these incidents could have had very different outcomes had we not been able to use what3words," Mr Redshaw said."
The emergency services see something very useful here. Is there a better way to do it? Lat/Lon numbers just don't cut it.
There are further cases mentioned in the article from other police forces.
- South Yorkshire Police used it to find a 65-year-old man who became trapped after falling down a railway embankment in Sheffield.
- North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service found a woman who had crashed her car but was unsure where she was.
- Humberside Police were able to quickly resolve a hostage situation after the victim was able to tell officers exactly where she was being held.
If these are all completely made up, and have made it past the BBC, then I'm rather surprised.
EDIT: I think this must be the incident: https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-new...
(The report mentions a substantial search, and in particular commends the actions of good doggo PD Logan: https://twitter.com/HPDogSection/status/1103713458334416896)
Anyway, all these cases highlight the need for a much better way for emergency services to automatically receive GPS coordinates from calls - not for some wannabe rent-seeking proprietary app.
Maps show the grid as an overlay every 1km so the position is easy to read.
* translations so often don't work in a one-to-one fashion, it'd be risky to expect them to do so.
* this is a big deal.
* had you read the article, it specifically explains that you don't need a data connection to determine the address. Also, GPS coordinates are a terrible way to pass locations between humans, numbers are easy to transpose, mess up, forget.
That's hardly a point in What3Words' favor. They dragged words into it where previously there were only numbers so now they're responsible for finding a solution to the problem of words' cultural specificity. I don't think "our coordinates contain zero information that crosses linguistic boundaries" is a good solution to that problem.
See previous discussions on HN for more background. Their one success story is how they managed to get the Mongolian postal services to adopt their tool.
Can you imagine someone lost on a mountain side telling the emergency operator that he is located at 'snake.apple.dimwit' and getting asked to please just give coordinates or even a rough idea of where you might be in terms of local names, because the What3Wordsⓒ database is down?
I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it.
I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :)
What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon.
If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!
Or even the venerable Maidenhead Locator, even though it's not well specified for high location precision.
https://plus.codes/6PJ4CWRW+H3 for anyone who wants to play around with it.
Although I must say that '6PJ4CWRW+H3' is still harder to communicate than horse.cow.sheep for example. That is the clever thing about what3words, the design of the addresses. What I like about Open Location Code is that adjacent squares have a similar name.
When you call some delivery service and ask them to find you at course.serial.flower, they could end up querying one of:
- coarse.serial.flower
- course.cereal.flower
- course.serial.flour
- coarse.cereal.flower
- coarse.serial.flour
- course.cereal.flour
- coarse.cereal.flour
In practice, you'll either need to be extra careful about specifying locations this way, or you'll need to provide extra location data like zip/city/etc. as error-correcting code. But at that point, it seems like you're not much better off than you would be with conventional addresses or LAT/LON coordinates for common use cases.
Replacing it with a new proprietary, closed system that can only be accessed from app is a terrible idea.
Reminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some governments fell into using them.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-....
> The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.
> If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.
> You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!
Emergency services would have to be using the same flavor of English as the victim.
As opposed to e.g. the Maidenhead locator, this has the properties of a hash - in other words, isn't trivially reversible, and you need the w3w company to provide you with the location, each and every time (jackpot!).
All of which are fine for someone lost in X mountain range. The operator on the other side will know whether -50.* or 14.* is latitude or longitude.
Also, you would just read the numbers from your screen, no ambiguity there.
People? No steeple ... S as in Sam, steeple.
Was that mound or found?
B as in boy, o as in Oscar, u as in unit....
Ok, steeple, boy, Oscar...
There is a reason the military alphabet exists and all numbers are pronounced as is (except for the occasional Niner to avoid confusing nine with 5)
I doubt that's true for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code and so I'd be less concerned about incentives changing over time (also, it doesn't need a central maintainer for the hash map).
If you have a bunch of folks exchanging the following 3 Word Addresses, you better hope they get it textual in a medium that allows copy & paste - in which case OLC is no worse off.
语焉不详.思潮.眼球 (962CWVRJ+9X)
ज्ञात.महाकाय.भौहों (9G4729FC+39)
(58H58WHV+GX) القول.تفريق.لأهتم
เคี้ยว.สมุนไพร.ผัก (9F4MG95X+7M)
штанишки.вытер.разбавлять (8GW3XJP2+RV)
And then there's terms of use:
- For 3 Word Addresses you (hopefully) get "a non-assignable, non-transferable, non-exclusive and revocable licence". (note: revocable)
- And worse, with the list above I might have violated their ToS: "Further, you must not publish (yourself or via a third party) any list or database of 3 Word Addresses with 3 Word Address Locations".
- It's also not allowed to provide a service that translates a 3 Word Address into something else (such as OLC or GPS coordinates) so they could be used with software or devices that happen to use different schemes: "you may use any 3 Word Address in any way that you wish, provided ... you in no way use 3 Word Addresses or 3 Word Address Locations to provide or seek to provide a product or service the same as or similar to any product or service provided by us"
- Finally, if they ever decide to shut down their server, all your 3 Word Address are gone as "any copying, re-utilisation, extraction, reproduction or redistribution of the what3words Materials ... is expressly prohibited".
But I think this is much better for police specifically. For reasons that are not about data or systems so much as physical practicality.
Consider circumstances like these: A panicked hairdresser lost in the forest. An old person with progressing dementia; forgot where they were. A kidnapped child trapped in a room or locked in a car. Anyone in a burning building who can smell smoke. Try any of these situations when the cellphone is at 5%, or when the call keeps dropping, or when you can barely hear because it's so loud, or barely see, or you're drunk, your hand is broken, you're on drugs, you're dehydrated, you're hypothermic, you're bleeding, you're surrounded by buzzing insects...
Now think about the physical practicalities of a numbers system like GPS. To use any numerical system, you're talking about memorizing a string of eight or ten digits off one app and then reading them into a phone call. Yes, it may be possible to go on speaker and minimize the call app (if nobody is hunting you) but lots of people can't figure that out on their best day, much less in life-threatening situations. You have to be able to memorize it when you're afraid of death or shivering in the cold outside. Maybe the call gets disconnected and you have to go back, oh shit I closed the app, what was the number, oh I mixed up some numbers near the end, oh my god....
Almost anyone can remember three words without trying. A child can do it and my grandma can do it. Even if you get disconnected, it won't be hard to remember the words even minutes later. You can't miss a number, you can't transpose the numbers by accident because if you make a mistake it'll be obvious since the words aren't adjacent in the grid (for this reason). It's incredibly practical for the physical and mental constraints of a police situation, and that's why they use it.
https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...
In other words, an open system will IMHO languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing funding.