Show HN: Give 7 billion people a physical address
locationawarenames.org
locationawarenames.org
NOZAXO-JEJEZU, NUZAXOJ-JAJEZUN and here's one from another location in the city PABAXO-GAKEZU. First, I wouldn't like to prominently use these names on my business as I would be naming them nearly the same as any other one on my street. Second, it is not clear at a glance that the second address is in the same area. And without specifically saying "Atlanta" you lose all types of information about taxes, police, fire and other government type things which apply to areas bound by complex curves in lat-lon space.
Here's three other addresses: BAJASU-BONEXO, DAFASU-DUTEXON, LIDEJA-KESERO
Two of these are about 10 miles apart and the other is thousands of miles away. I can see some similarities to the ones close by but if just given a single UBI name, I doubt I'd have any clue where it is. It seems that actually seeing lat-lon numbers might make it easier to see that locations are close together.
This is also ignoring streets, which carve complex paths through lat-lon space. I'm not sure if the street name is wrapped up in these UBI names but losing that information would be terrible for locals or honestly anyone else traveling. If you know something is on "broad st." and you are on broad st., then you can follow the road to get there. If you are looking for NUZAXOJ-JAJEZUN and you are at NOZAXO-JEJEZU, you may not realize that you are on the same street.
I didn't go through the entire set of slides as it was pretty onerous, some having 7 clicks to reveal everything in them. I think I got the basic idea though and I don't really see a use case for this replacing any part of our current system. I would never name a business using these. They are unnatural and difficult to pronounce, so I'm not sure how the "Pine Hill" example is valid. Adding these to existing addresses would be useful, in the sense that adding lat-lon to an existing address would be useful but I don't find them more readable than lat-lon. And the UBIs have the negative effect of needing to be translated to lat-lon in order to find locations.
It seems that they get something like 16-20 bits per word or so. I think my first approach in this case would be to feed lat/long through a cylindrical equal-area projection, since the math for those is pretty simple (so it can be implemented in diverse systems easily) and at least there is a semblance of fairness to the resulting numbers -- but really, I think what you want is to cover the Earth with a massive geodesic dome of points and just number the vertices with some algorithm, perhaps placing a great circle on the Greenwich line and then descending around in some sort of spiral. There's no fundamental reason I can see why we'd need to project at all, really.
So, you form two numbers with the Gall-Peters projection:
2^9 * (most significant 9 bits of x) + most significant 9 bits of y
2^9 * (least significant 9 bits of x) + least significant 9 bits of y
You take these numbers, and multiply them by some large prime, modulo the number that you've got. Prime multiplication is a simple way to permute the numbers so that adjacent vertices are unlikely to be numbered similarly. If you really wanted, you could then XOR it with some fixed pattern and multiply by another large prime, which may help with names being similar at the poles themselves or something (depending on the size of the prime). Any quasi-random permutation will work, I just figure "let's take the ones that are only a couple fixed lines of code." The nice thing about these permutations, too, is that they're invertible: someone gives you a name, you convert it to a number, you pass it back through this, and you get map/geodesic coordinates.
Then you convert those numbers into syllables. This way you can know that your city is mostly DAFAXO except the northeastern part is part of LINUZU, completely different names. The most significant bits are thus scrambled but isolated. The least significant bits are scrambled separately and give every point on the ground a wildly different name, so that nobody confuses your place with one down the street.
Location Aware Names used as Global Addresses is one of the choices you can use. If you want to keep the current Street & Number format you can use Location Aware Street Names, so your business address can be at street "Clerigo Tigorros 155" and the building in front of you will be at "Clerigo Tigorros 158", you can use it just like any other street with the Street name and number.
You can get there using your offline address like "Clerigo Tigorros 155@gazado-fifene" or even if the town is already on a map using "Clerigo Tigorros 155@(Naranjito, itapua, Paraguay)" so every street in town will share the same Zone code @gazado-fifene if you want to know if they are in the same area.
http://ubicate.me/street/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&street=Clerigo...
In case you wonder this name was generated for a spanish speaking town, clerigo means "cleric", so you can use any language you want to generate the street names.
I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a "Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, hope that improves the experience!.
If you have any other question or suggestion let me know.
Different languages have different sets of phonemes. For instance, in Japanese, "L" and "R" are allophones, meaning native speakers consider the sounds to be the same. So, take these two UBI's:
http://ubicate.me/NALADU-MAMOKE
http://ubicate.me/NARADU-MAMOKE
Smack dab in the middle of Tokyo, about 15 minutes apart from each other.
Also, this would require speakers having the same vowel distribution/phonological rules. I pronounce "PACASU-FADERO" and "PACASU-FEDERO" pretty similarly. Relying on letters that are only different in voicing is also risky. For instance, take "P" and "B". It's easy to mistake "PACASU-BATERO" for "PACASU-PATERO".
Finally, street names have an advantage over UBI's. Street names are usually formed from words in the inhabitants' native language, so they sound more natural and will of course be easier to pronounce.
I totally agree with you in that there is no way a single algorithm can produce pleasent result in every language, what sounds fairly good in Italian or Afrikaan might sound illegible in Japanese.
But even then, might be a little easier to send a SMS saying "Meet me at NALADU-MAMOKE" than "Meet me at 35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E ".
If the resulting name does not work for you as name you might want to use, see it as a tool available to handle easier "35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E "
>Finally, street names have an advantage over UBI's. Street names are usually formed from words in the inhabitants' native language, so they sound more natural and will of course be easier to pronounce.
You can use Location Aware Street Names, using not generated names, but words in your language that form street names, like "Doctor Stifus" for example, and using street numbers on it, so you can say I live at "Doctor Stifus 50" so your address will be "Doctor Stifus 50@gazado-fifene"
I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a "Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, there you can check the Street Names concept.
I think this is an innovative idea you propose, but because it runs against the grain of what it means to be human, it may not receive the uptake you would like.
I certainly agree with you, but you dont have to replace the names you are already using to take advantage of this, you can say:
not_that_noob
Washington Ave 123
Washington DC
BIFAPU-BATEDU
And then you have Location Aware Street Names, where you can use words in your language to form street names, so you might use words that are more cultural meaningful to us.
A name is a word with a long tradition of being used as a name, or sounding really close to one.
Perhaps a better idea would be to use 3-4 word names like "Third Rainy Pine Hill" where you have a large dictionary of words that can be strung together and you can translate them in different languages.
Because everybody's got a device that has GPS and can decode these opaque strings, right? /facepalm
I humbly submit that this is a very nice solution in desperate and ultimately fruitless search for a problem.
As others have mentioned, lots of other human readable info is stored in a traditional address, so this really won't do as a replacement, but as a "line at the end of an address" that works anywhere in the world it's pretty cool.
(the advantage it has over the straight geo coordinates is obviously that it is pronounceable, and hopefully easier to remember.)
And what happens if you misspell it? The example of spelling "Pine Hill" as "Pine Hil" is easy for a human to see and correct; would I be able to realize that "RERY-NOOCA" was a typo?
These are also utterly useless for navigating without GPS. Even if we assume that all maps are replaced with ones that have this letter-based coordinate system as their grid, I still can't see it being easy to give directions, or to navigate without a phone.
How does this work for languages that do not use Roman characters?
There is a scheme for creating "street names" in this (though it doesn't seem to handle streets that turn). However these names are all pretty much gibberish names. And naming all streets this way would remove the local character of place names - a Los Angeles street name has a different character from a New Orleans street name, and a Parisian street name has a stranger one yet.
I dunno. It's moderately clever but it doesn't really feel like it's designed for human-scale interactions.
If you need to meet at exact locations where both parties don't have a common name for and no commonly-assigned address exists (like someplace in the middle of a large park), just provide a coordinate -- it will be accurate and all GPS/Map systems can take them, including your phone.
And how does one achieve the sort of critical mass where the average person on the street knows their own home location?
If I'd heard my office name over the phone using the ubicate system I might instead head for http://ubicate.me/TACEGE-CARAVAN ... which looks to be about 30 miles off the coast of Holland, not on the York ring road :-)
So I get the idea, but this algorithm produces awful names.
what3words noticed that you needs less than 1800 words to assign a combination of 3 words to every square meter on earth, so those words can be chosen to be different from each other, unambiguous, common etc. Still ENGLISH and not very international, but it's a much better idea.
This whole idea seems like a variation on "the world would be better if only it was run by computer logic" (where better = more orderly and machine readable). For whatever reason, other considerations (cultural affinity, convenience in a daily context, etc.) seem to be more important to most people.
This is a general rant around this rather popular method of sharing presentations.
Having to hit "next" to have to step through the additions to a particular slide is the worst.
I made a non animated and "cut to the chase" slideshow you can acces on a "Slides are too slow?" link now on the website, hope that improves the experience!.
The idea is to use what we already have now, "Names" but encoding information inside them, if you get to the Location Aware Street Names slides, you can see how it can be used to make some very interesting stuff, fast forward to slide 55.
Just my 2 cents.
Maybe a chance in third world countries, but then you need to partner with all major online map makers to make this the default or a prominent identifier in all their softwares.
In this case, there is a one-to-one correlation. Functionally it is somewhat similar, but you could figure out the location of one of these crazy names by running through a simple algorithm, locally. You don't need to make requests to a remote server, to do the DNS lookup.
I would also disagree that these "names" are easy to remember. :) They are pretty random. I doubt these names follow any of the "rules" that human language does, either. They are mapped to a system of numbers. Human languages share some common rules and organization, I believe.
Human phonemes exist in a continuous N-dimensional space. There are two problems to defining a universal phonetic set: 1) different populations use different areas of the space. For example, some cultures use hardly any vowels, some hardly any consonants. 2) different populations quantize the space at different boundaries. So even two cultures who both have 5 vowels may find that what is unambiguously 'e' in one culture is 'a' or 'e' in another. And those are just the major problems. The usual solution is to have a set of glyphs that the are labeled in a locally distinguishable way. We have those - digits.
"I found my thrill / on MARAMUT-GACIRA"
"JODEGE-SIFAJAR is in my ears and in my eyes"
"JACEGE-RURAJA forever"
Post code is max 7 characters. People could live at number 123, which is over 9 characters. Or they could live at a flat and house number - flat 1, number 12. Which is again over 9 characters.
You should never have to specify more than 1 number. If you have to say flat 1, number 12 the post office needs to assign you a new number (e.g. 12a).
Still beats the hell out of MARAMUT-GACIRA, especially as post codes give a lot of information (I know instantly whether a postcode is in or outside London, and if inside roughly where)
The postcode district states which sorting office delivers to the address, leading to upmarket Windsor having a Slough postcode SL5
EC1A - inside The City; EC1M - outside The City.
EN1 - in a London Borough; EN10 - In a Hertfordshire borough.
KT9 - Inside M25 and in a London Borough; KT11 Inside M25 and in a Surrey borough.
But for your examples:
EC1A and EC1M are both in or around the city
EN1 is enfield I think? So far north, EN10 I imagine is just further north
KT9 I think is Kingston. Both KT9 and KT11 are probably south west near the edge of london
> I can only manage that if you define London as "The area covered by the London compass-direction based postal districts"
That's actually basically what I meant. Compass postcode = london, non-compass is effectively outside london (or on the very edge)
Either way, the point that post codes carry a lot more information than codes generated from GPS coordinates still stands
Even in cities, it's not particularly unusual to have houses that don't have numbers, especially older houses -- in my parents' postcode, two of the houses only have a name.
House names are fully supported by correctly implemented postcode lookup systems -- for example, in the common online use-case where you enter your postcode and a list of houses is brought up, the list will include the houses that only have name identifiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system
You can say that it's meaningless to a person that doesn't, but in a context where everyone does you can't argue that it's "low quality information". In the same sense, totally disregarding that people sometimes share a cultural heritage, personal history or conversational context and use this to their advantage, "Yes" or "No" would be really awful information. Nothing is a good conveyor of information by itself.
What does BAJASU-BONEXO say about anything before I stuff it into a computer that arbitrarily translate it to a set of coordinates (an existing system invented to solve the same problem)? If everyone needs a device to decode it, what advantage does it have over just sharing the coordinates?
With 1 meter granularity, what prevents people from assigning different names to what is essentially the same place, in a way that potentially prevents either of the hundreds of thousands of names generated for a 1 km^2 Pine Hill from ever catching on?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a neat idea. Turning coordinates into pronounceable words means that you could easily share an exact location over a phone line. It's just that I think that it's arrogant to say that the tradition of naming places is somehow inferior to what essentially is a totally different thing. To present them as something that is meant to replace an "old algorithm" (referring to a practice that is mostly non-algorithmic) is big-headed and geographically and culturally ignorant.
The main idea behind the concept of Location Aware Names is to re-think the way we give name to places, from a information point of view.
Is there a better way to use names as an information unit? can we improve the current "algorithm" that we use to name places?: I think so.
It will replace the current way we name them?: I dont think so.
Is UBI the best use of Location Aware Names?: Hopefully not!, UBI is a proof of concept of the idea, maybe you can come up with something much better.
Is using RERI-NUCA better than the Street & Number: Maybe not if you already have your street and number location on a map , but is one step forward from 65° 42' N,170° 35' 60.0'' W
Actual names are made from words in the inhabitants native language, UBI names are odd: The Location Aware Names concept can be used to take language and cultural factors into account ,and create a references like "Doctor Stifus" or "Isaac Nousol" that are indistinguible from any other non Location Aware Names (see slide 43)
It will be very hard to adopt: Of course, but it can start as simple as an option to encode from the current http://goo.gl/maps/EdGCc on google to http://goo.gl/maps/FULABOS-LUNETE
The idea of Location Aware Names is to add a different set of options to our current way of see and use names, with their advantages and disadvantages
The thing is, geodetic systems, WGS84 and others, are an approximation, that is mostly invisible since maps are also in WGS84. The problem only appears when you try to convert between geodetic systems. When you convert your coordinates, the errors from the approximation might not be the same between your two geodetic systems, to correct those approximation you need an intermediate model, which depends on local topography, and that can be calculated only when observing directly that topography.
So, if for some reason, we have to abandon GPS for another localization system, this naming convention will be likely to load to wrong physical locations when coordinates will be derived from names. Then we will need to build those local models globally, and rely on them forever, or rename everything, or rely on human memory to rebuild maps just like the ones we have, but with the legacy of those encoded names, far worse to remember the the ones we already have.
0: How does the street algorithm work?
1: Not everywhere can effectively be described as a point with varying degrees of precision. Some places are long and thin. How do I tell my friend that I'll be somewhere along a certain meandering river, but not the adjacent canal?
2: Dumb IDs are good, they are stable, and even if they happen to contain some kind of hint, no one is relying on the hint and can still use them. How do you account for tectonics? Dammit! an earthquake! I'll need to tell everyone my new address!
3: Internationalisation. RERI-NUCA and GASAVI-CALILO will be difficult or impossible for some, if not most literate local residents of those places.
Even if legible, some sequences may be phonologically incompatible with the language spoken in the area. Therefore, you'd ideally want different versions of the algorithm for different natural languages. This might then require the addition of another datum to denote the algorithm used, so that I don't get lost going to en:RERI-NUCA when I'm supposed to be going to pt:RERI-NUCA.
>0: How does the street algorithm work?
I will publish the algorithm hopefully next week on the website as public domain
> 1: Not everywhere can effectively be described as a point with varying degrees of precision. Some places are long and thin. How do I tell my friend that I'll be somewhere along a certain meandering river, but not the adjacent canal?
At the time you can also describe streets , or lines on space with Location Aware Street Names.
>2: Dumb IDs are good, they are stable, and even if they happen to contain some kind of hint, no one is relying on the hint and can still use them. How do you account for tectonics? Dammit! an earthquake! I'll need to tell everyone my new address!
You are right, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis and natural disasters can wipe out landmarks and leave addresses or conventional signaling unusable , Location Aware Names remains always unalterable.
>3: Internationalisation. RERI-NUCA and GASAVI-CALILO will be difficult or impossible for some, if not most literate local residents of those places.
I totally agree with you in that there is no way a single algorithm can produce pleasent result in every language, what sounds fairly good in Italian or Afrikaan might sound illegible in Japanese.
But even then, might be a little easier to send a SMS saying "Meet me at NALADU-MAMOKE" than "Meet me at 35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E ".
If the resulting name does not work for you as name you might want to use, see it as a tool available to handle easier "35° 42' 36'' N, 139° 38' 24'' E "
The idea of different versions of the algorithm for different languages is something worth of researching.
Tongue in cheek of course, but I don't think that _that_ problem would limit the adoption. I fail to see how this might reach a critical mass, but ambigious (parts) of names? We already have that today and handle that fine in general.
- Nearby places have very simillar names; Just changes one letter "U" with "O"
But how does this handle misspellings? Not sure if it already has it but there should be CRC check in the first or last letter to make sure the address printed misspelled a C instead of a G.
Coincidentally I published a post about almost exactly the same thing only a few hours ago, http://h14s.p5r.org/2014/09/z-quads-strings.html. But it focuses more on the algorithmic side which is why I'm curious about the mechanics of UBIs.
What happens if they do that?
I see a lot of names depending on consonant-E and consonant-A pairs, but in the English language how you pronounce those sounds can wind up being very similar dependent on context.
This should be started for people names too, stop silly names and lets put some genetic into.
That's the idea, to start thinking about names and how can be improved, Location Aware Names is just a starting point not a final product.
you can use zones for that, but at the time works for circular areas, try RERI-NUCA 800