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Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

203 points by beseku 12y ago

n0body 12y ago
It gave me a map code that was longer than my postcode. I'm not sure how postcodes work everywere else in the world, but in the uk they point to a specific road, so it's pretty good for navigating to a place with. I do know that in belgium they point to an area, so they're not as good as a navigation aid.
- linker3000 12y ago
  ISTR that UK postcodes narrow things down to around 15 properties.
- xxxmadraxxx 12y ago
  I live in quite a big block of maisonettes. At the maximum map zoom level, trying to pin down the exact location of my particular house gave me about three options to choose from –just by moving the cursor a few mm in any direction. So what happens then? Do I pick the mapcode I like best? Does some central body decide which is my 'official' mapcode? Living in the UK, I don't see what this offers over my postcode, which identifies my location to within a couple of houses. The houses across the street have a different postcode to me as do my neighbours three doors away. Theoretically* all anyone needs to find me is my house number and postcode. Try it. Send me a postcard: madra 84A <----- house no. M15 6FD <----- postcode England *Actually, it's not theoretical. I have as an experiment in the past sent someone a letter addressed just to their house number and postcode and it got there. In spite of that I do tend to write out fuller addresses though. It just seems a bit too 'minimalist' relying on only the postcode.
beseku 12y ago
Subtitle taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10975625/Did-TomTom-just-kill-the-postcode.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10975625/Did-TomT...
- judk 12y ago
  Ah. That makes the title+link less obnoxiously self-Betteridged, but still obnoxiously Betteridged.
- dang 12y ago
  It's against the HN guidelines to editorialize in titles, even when the editorialization was done by somebody else. This one was particularly bad because the submitted title ("Did TomTom founders just kill the postcode?") caused the post to receive a barrage of user flags.
jgrahamc 12y ago
Similar idea: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html
- micheljansen 12y ago
  Nice idea to include a check digit. Mapcode doesn't have that (though they recommend specifying the country separately). On the other hand, with only 4 characters, Mapcode should be easy enough to remember.
drsintoma 12y ago
So what's the upside of this vs Geohash? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
- hnha 12y ago
  patents and ambiguity where you have to also mention the country and sometimes, but just sometimes, the state.
- quantized 12y ago
  Pros of MapCodes vs. Geohashes: * MapCodes are shorter by 200-300% for a given accuracy level, assuming each MapCode is prefixed by a two-letter country code for clarity. Cons of MapCodes vs. Geohashes: * MapCodes only offer one accuracy level, of apprx. 100 m^2 regions, whereas a Geohash can be arbitrarily accurate. * MapCodes do not guarantee persistence. They can be redefined at any time, for any reason, at the sole discretion of the project designer, leaving you with a nonreferential or falsely referential code. * MapCodes do not encode location data within the code, so access to the server is required at all times. If you lack internet access, or if the service is DDoSed, hacked, goes out of business, etc. your codes become useless.
crazy1van 12y ago
The associated patent application: http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013057221A1?cl=en http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013057221A1?cl=en
- cabalamat 12y ago
  According to <http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html> http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html>: > The mapcode system is a free, open standard. Which is it, open or patent-encumbered? It can't be both.
axyjo 12y ago
No. They serve entirely different purposes.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Yep, if this were feasible as a postcode then we'd have switched to lat/long addresses ages ago.
codeduck 12y ago
Mapcodes are a free, open way to make every house or location on Earth addressable by a short code. With nothing else except your mapcode, for instance, a navigation system will bring someone to within meters of your front door. So what happens if you live in a multi-story block of flats?
- micheljansen 12y ago
  Presumably, for car navigation, that doesn't matter (that's what the address is for).
- bitJericho 12y ago
  I think this is to improve on postal codes, not address multiple-person dwellings. The flat/apt/suite number would take care of that.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tonymillion 12y ago
I hereby invoke Betteridge's law of headlines. (unless they can convince every postal service in the world to throw away hundreds of years of dogma)
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Wouldn't this change the entire address and number? The problem is, you can't find a place without a GPS (or another digital device) :-(
- contingencies 12y ago
  You are correct. This is the real problem. (They even use an Indian business card as an example...)
grey-area 12y ago
Objections: 1. This mapcode is country specific (!) 2. Many locations need altitude or fine lat,lon differences to differentiate them (e.g. blocks of flats, offices). 3. What's wrong with altitude, lat and lon on a given projection which can be as precise/imprecise as you want? IMO it'd be better to have a hash of lat,lon,altitude which was globally unique for each level of precision. A system like this needs to be globally unique without specifying country, or you may as well use a postcode. The only advantage over postcodes at present is it's slightly shorter.
- sp332 12y ago
  It's a bit buried, but only some of the mapcodes are country-specific. "Every location on Earth has an "international" mapcode, completely independent of territorial borders. So any location that has a national mapcode also has an international mapcode." http://www.mapcode.com/popup_alts.html http://www.mapcode.com/popup_alts.html
- jisaacso 12y ago
  There exists a hash of lat, long globally unique for each level of precision, a geohash [1]. One common application utilizes a space filling Hilbert curve to define an arbitrary precision bounding box around a set of coordinates. You can see an example hash [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.org/9q8yyvfekk8h http://geohash.org/9q8yyvfekk8h
  - grey-area 12y ago
    I reckon you need to include latitude as well, or it's not really going to be useful for specifying position in cities.
  - javadocmd 12y ago
    If you'll pardon the reckless self-promotion, there's a few Java implementations to do Geohash calculations: https://code.google.com/p/simplelatlng/ https://code.google.com/p/simplelatlng/
  - mxfh 12y ago
giergirey 12y ago
Another interesting similar idea - http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ .
vjvj 12y ago
There is already a service like this that uses 3 words instead of that weird string: http://what3words.com http://what3words.com
- kordless 12y ago
  Come find me at premium.gravely.pies.
hawleyal 12y ago
Terrible site design
PaulHoule 12y ago
It doesn't replace the post code by any means, but it's definitely a nice way to program a GPS.
ekidd 12y ago
Overall, this looks pretty interesting, assuming your goal is to communicate physical locations with an accuracy of a couple of meters using a format that fits on a business card. It can also be used without country names, if you prefer it that way (just select "International" when generating the code.) Developer downloads here: http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V This is patented, with an ISO standard in progress, and the following licensing terms (from their developer page): The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way that would result in the production of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in any way to generate a different system that produces codes to represent locations. In order to prevent misuse, unauthorised alterations, copying or commercial exploitation, please note that the ideas and algorithms behind the mapcode system have been patented and that the term "mapcode" is a registered trademark of the Stichting Mapcode Foundation. Part of the motivation is the lack of usable postcodes in many countries: Unfortunately, a large part of the world population has no address. In India alone, well over half a billion people live in houses that have no street name. They play some interesting tricks with population density and country "contexts" to shorten codes: 4. People live within a “country context”. Addresses seldom include a country name. Unless clearly stated otherwise, they can safely be assumed to be in “this” country. Codes that are known to be within a particular territory can be designed to be much shorter. 6. Short codes are reserved for areas where the population density is high.
- ff7c11 12y ago
  They call it ...a free, open way to make every house ... and then they say The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way not very open
jxf 12y ago
I'm a little confused about what this replaces, but it's definitely not postcodes. * Postcodes have a specific meaning: they're both a geographical area and a mail delivery zone (at least in the US). Replacing one short code with another, which requires a different and less reliable third-party service to correctly decode, doesn't seem like a good idea. * Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous, well-understood, and don't require a third-party service to be online in order to correctly decode. So it doesn't seem like this can replace latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation. * Broadly speaking, while addresses have a lot of problems, they're unambiguous with human context. So this doesn't seem like it really replace addresses either. * For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"), I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. That might be very helpful. Also, won't there be multiple mapcodes for a single spot and won't that require cross-association of the respective metadata? For example, consider that Central Park is also in Manhattan, also part of NYC, also in Midtown in NYC, etc. I guess that's not necessarily a problem, but it could lead to a lot of expensive processing for frequently updated locations/boundaries (e.g. a beach, a suburban development in progress, etc.).
- diydsp 12y ago
  > latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation. That's a much smarter idea than this mapcode system. It would make sense to replace the base-10 representation with base 36.... at least in the Roman alphabet. It would probably be smarter to pick a base that works with the world's alphabets. Oh yeah, not all the world uses alphabets! But even then, it's not that huge of an improvement, really! Every two digits of base 36 replace three digits of base 10. (36^2 = 1296). The b36 digits replace only 4 (or 4.5) base 10 digits. 4x b36 digits replace 6 base 10 digits. I think this may actually just be the Ham radio grid system I mentioned elsewhere. > For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"). Here, I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. Heh, at this point, I'm just thinking "URL". After all, it's a Universal resource locator. How about mapcode://CentralPark/my_favorite_bench.
tinco 12y ago
It's hard to get an understanding of the precise algorithm that's being used to generate the code. If it were a competitor of the postcode it would have to be possible to identify whether two places are close to eachother just by looking at the code right? From the patent I get the feeling that it's a bit like a C-ary space partitioning, where C is 36 (alphabet+numbers). So the first character divides the earth in 36 regions, the second character divides that region in 36 regions, and so on. With that in mind, I think once people would be a bit familiar with the general numbers for regions it would be pretty easy to identify what general region a mapcode would be in. So it might be a pretty good replacement of postcodes. Or am I missing some other fundamental property of postcodes?
- orbifold 12y ago
  I think that postcodes divide a country not evenly but are chosen by population density and the distribution structure of the post provider. Look at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Karte_Briefzentren_Deutsche_Post_AG.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Karte_Bri... for example, each distribution center is responsible for one or two double digit prefixes, the first digit roughly indicates the region. Areas with high population density have a much finer coverage. I don't think there would be any benefit from switching to Map Codes, as they have to be mapped to something like post codes anyways and they are not precise enough to serve as residential addresses.
ascorbic 12y ago
No, because postcodes aren't primarily geographical references. They just happen to be really useful for that. UK postcodes are arranged so that each one handles a similar amount of mail. This means that a residential street may share one or two postcodes, but a large organisation may have several postcodes to itself.
diydsp 12y ago
" A short address for any location on Earth" It doesn't check out: Surface Area of Earth: 510.1 * 10^6 km^2 Distinct map codes: 36^5 = 60.466176 * 10 ^6 Area of 1 map code = 8.4 km^2 Oh! It's narrowed by country... so it doesn't address any location on Earth. Only populated areas. If you want to actually refer to ANY location on Earth, there's another system, Ham Radio grids. It uses four to six digits and refers to either 70x100 or 3x4 miles squared. Probably useless for the business purposes, but at least it truthfully refers to any location on Earth.
- pilsetnieks 12y ago
  It is actually every area, and the length of the codes varies. I'm guessing that the most popular/populated places get the shortest codes and those further away get the longer codes. For example a location somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of Gran Canaria is International QFLQV.29KM while some place in the el Poble Sec district in Barcelona is Spain SG.YB.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  Its technically called the "Maidenhead Locater" and the specific format can be seen on the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
xbryanx 12y ago
This is neat, but I am confused why you wouldn't want to just tie location to geography and not country (aka nationality, a squishy and shifting idea). Why not just use UTM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
Omni5cience 12y ago
I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/.
- coder23 12y ago
  Or the artificial Swatch time, which doesn't solve anything. We already have an international time, Coordinated Universal Time. It only takes to know your offset and some basic addition to convert. Converting longitude and latitude to some other character base, like someone suggested would be better.
spountzy 12y ago
A lot to do about their map design. But it is quite quick in finding locations.
ing33k 12y ago
startup based on similar idea ( Based in Hyderabad / India ) http://zip.pr/ http://zip.pr/
pgt 12y ago
https://www.waytag.com/ https://www.waytag.com/ is a ZA startup that's been around for a few years. On a cursory glance, this seem quite similar? I don't think WayTag ever gained much traction.
sinak 12y ago
The TomTom founders definitely didn't "just kill the postcode." > Mapcodes were developed in 2001 by Pieter Geelen and Harold Goddijn, soon after the GPS satellite signals were opened up for civilian use. It was decided to donate the mapcode system to the public domain in 2008. Can we get an update to the click-baity title?
- coin 12y ago
  GPS was always available for civilian use since day one. Perhaps they meant when GPS's Selective Availability (degregration of accuracy civilians) was turned off, which was in 2000.
alixaxel 12y ago
Seems very similar to the NAC: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/ http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/
callesgg 12y ago
My first instinct was: bad idea. But then when I thought about it is actualy something that has troubled my quite some times. Lat and longitudes are perfectly fine but in general they are to "simple" for people to use. When I think of a location in the world I generally think of the country cause I know to some extent where most country's are located. For example I would to describe some place in Miami I would describe it as in the lower right side of US and continue to work downwards from that.
linker3000 12y ago
I started work on something pretty much like this about 5 years ago but never pursued it for various reasons. I still have one of the registered domains with nothing to show for my preliminary work: www.tinynav.co.uk I got as far as designing the encoding scheme, including a database of point types (house, utility pole, ancient monument, park, private event etc..), together with special codes for corporates to use for all their shops, fast food outlets etc. I had the database tables worked out, populated the locations table with open source/public domain data such as civil and commercial airports and some other stuff. There was a front end that allowed for time-limited one-offs for things like 'Jo's birthday party', but then life took over!
- brokenrhino 12y ago
  That sounds really great. I like the time limited parts. Things like concerts or art fairs always much up foursquare locations.
lucb1e 12y ago
Honestly, I don't like it. At first I thought it was a short, sort of binary (at least machine-readable) representation of coordinates. A,A might be (0,0) in our coordinate system. Turns out it's not. It's not even global but country (or in the US, state) specific. This means that the locations are controlled by a single entity together with country codes. Sure, postal codes are controlled by a single entity too, but at least they are regulated by the government using tax money instead of an arbitrary self-appointed committee. I know it's meant to replace postal codes and not coordinates, but I'd like to see something that actually represents a place instead of an arbitrarily shaped region. OpenStreetMap's homepage happens to do this for their short URLs: http://osm.org/go/0GFeWn2RJ http://osm.org/go/0GFeWn2RJ Try moving on the OpenStreetMap map with the share menu opened and the short URL option selected. You'll see how it influences the short URL. But anyway, back to replacing postal codes: the main advantage of this is that it'd be a universal and short code. In The Netherlands you could specify: NL 6114HT 41 and you'd have house number 41 at the Marktstraat (market street) in Susteren (city). Not much longer. And with this new system you'd still need to look up country-specific codes so I don't see much of an advantage.
- microcolonel 12y ago
  Mapcodes are coordinates within a rectangular region, you define the region, then the code(or if you're IN the region, you don't need to worry about defining it). One of the available regions is "Earth", which offers global coordinates(they're a bit longer, four or five characters on each side of the dot). The upside of this is that it is possible to implement it completely offline, you don't need to query the regions from a database, because they're already defined. You just run the algorithm to project the local coordinates onto global coordinates, and your GPS system will handle that.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    One of the available regions is "Earth", which offers global coordinates(they're a bit longer, four or five characters on each side of the dot). Why not just use lat, lon, which can be shorter too? Central park, NY - 40.78 -73.97 Hyde Park, LON - 51.51, -0.17
Shish2k 12y ago
> The mapcode foundation reserves the right to change the country list and population density maps, at which point existing codes will point to different places or be invalid Nope.jpg
- mseebach 12y ago
  From the docs: "[This] issue should be prevented at all costs. The second [adding new countries] may be necessitated by changes to the world order, i.e. new countries coming into being. But unless changes are made by a single central authority, the first issue will quickly come to be."
nakedrobot2 12y ago
No.
basicallydan 12y ago
No, they didn't. They "killed" parts of addresses. Also, these are still hard to remember. Personally, I'm a fan of http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ I'm currently here: http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent
- chippy 12y ago
  I like what3words also. What I'd really like is a hierarchy so that given >lives.fend.spent when you saw the words >lives.fend.rabbi you knew it was nearby, within the "fend" place or that >lives.gopher.spoon was within the "lives" places
  - hnha 12y ago
    Sounds like usa.newyork.brooklyn would be a smart extension. Quick, let me patent it and trademark the term "3 or more words that describe a location in hierarchical order". Or maybe I will just call it "backwaddress". :P
  - basicallydan 12y ago
    Hey, that is a cool idea. It's basically a less verbose address system isn't it?
paul_f 12y ago
What problem does this solve, exactly?
- lstamour 12y ago
  From their reference doc: > The mapcode system was revived and worked out in 2006 when TomTom decided to expand their operations to countries like India and China. It was difficult to sell navigation devices in these countries, among other things because a significant part of the population lives without address, lacking not just house numbers but often even street names, which often made it hard or even impossible to enter a destination. It was thought that the introduction of a simple and ubiquitous system for representing locations (and hence destinations) would in due time make navigation devices as welcome there as anywhere else.
viraptor 12y ago
> What is a mapcode? [...] They are precise to a few meters, which is good enough for every-day use. Yeah, but so are the British post codes. 6-7 symbols and you're down to meters usually. At least for the cities. They definitely bring you close to the front doors.
fixermark 12y ago
It's unfortunate that their map-encoding solution appears to be based on TomTom's dataset, instead of Google Maps. It therefore thinks my house is my neighbor's house. Open Street Map is, sadly, no better, thinking my house is a different neighbor's house.
- chippy 12y ago
  OpenStreetMap's better in that you can correct it yourself or leave a note for someone else to fix
  - fixermark 12y ago
    That's possible with Google Maps also (http://www.google.com/mapmaker http://www.google.com/mapmaker) But thank you for noting that I can do the same with OSM. After making an account and logging in, I've created a feature-point for my address, but I don't see a way to correct or suppress the incorrect information from OpenStreetMap Nominatim. shrug Problem for another day.
    - chippy 12y ago
      Hmm, I think that Nominatim gets updated with a bit of lag (minutes to an hour), so the address should be there now? Assuming you changed the information from the map, it should update it within Nominatim, as it get's it's info from the map If not, you can leave a note http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/new http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/new and someone can take a look at it. I've been contributing for a while now and still like using Notes to let people with more techy experience or local knowledge help.
      - fixermark 12y ago
        Looks like it's updated. Thank you for the tip!
- maxerickson 12y ago
  If OpenStreetMap being wrong really bothers you, you can fix it. I mean to point that out in an abstract sense more than I mean to implore you to do so. As a rule, address data in OSM is very incomplete and the Nominatim instance on osm.org falls back to things like TIGER data to do geocoding. If you are in a region where there are a lot of addresses present in the OSM data, it would be great if you could at least drop a note nearby stating that the addresses in the area have problems (it's the button shaped like a cartoon word balloon, on the right hand side of the page). (Housenumbers show up when zoomed in, if they aren't showing, then the OpenStreetMap website is showing you results based on some fallback data.)
gkoz 12y ago
The choice of Cyrillic translations seems arbitrary to me. There is a well known Morse code convention (Q=Щ, V=Ж, W=В, X=Ь, Y=Ы).
- blahedo 12y ago
  The problem with e.g. W=В or X=Ь is that they want glyph matching; so the roman alphabet B and the cyrillic alphabet В (even though they are different letters) map to each other, to avoid having same-looking codes map to different locations. They're solving a slightly different problem than the Morse convention was trying to solve.
cabalamat 12y ago
> Areas claimed by two countries are simply included in both contexts. If I understand this correctly, it means that any address in a disputed territory has multiple mapcodes, one for each claimant, and therefore whichever one you use you are implicitly backing one political claim over the others. If so, this is a potential can of worms that many people won't want to open.
wspeirs 12y ago
I guess today is the day for talking about encoding locations on earth on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053032
qwerta 12y ago
ZIP code is also used in astronomy: http://healpix.sourceforge.net/ http://healpix.sourceforge.net/
deltaqueue 12y ago
Having traveled to several countries without formal addresses, this looks like a godsend for navigation. It has no regional segmentation (i.e. no drill-down reference like country-state-zip-city levels), however, so it's useless as a cultural reference. Slightly off topic, but I'm stupefied at how much faster TomTom's maps (and Bing, apparently!) are than GoogleMaps.
hds 12y ago
I'm curious about what happens when a geographical location changes country. If Catalunya gains independence from Spain, will the MapCode associated with my house here in Barcelona change? Will the old "Spanish" MapCode still be valid? Speaking of current events, do Isreal and Palestine have separate MapCodes and what happens when borders shift?
davexunit 12y ago
I don't like this. From what little I have read, mapcodes appear to be proprietary, despite advertising a "free, open standard". >Mapcodes are free. They can be used by anyone, and may be supported, provided or generated by anyone, as long as this is done free of charge, conditions or restrictions Why can't someone charge money for a service that generates mapcodes? >The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way that would result in the production of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in any way to generate a different system that produces codes to represent locations. I think this means that the source code they are distributing is proprietary, because we cannot use it for any purpose.
- cwp 12y ago
  There's quite a bit of territory between "proprietary" and "free software, as approved by the FSF". If the MapCode sources are free for any purpose except confusing people, I'm fine with that.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Certainly not compatible with Debian free software guidelines.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
frankus 12y ago
I, for one, really like this. * It doesn't use postal codes, which aren't really intended for use for anything but mail delivery and occasionally make that painfully apparent (such as when the boundaries are changed) * It doesn't depend on street addresses, so it works in countries where the streets aren't reliably or intelligibly named/numbered. It also works in places where there are no streets. * It's smarter about allocating code space than something like a 10:10 code, since e.g. not a lot of people live in the middle of the ocean (and they can always use a "fully-qualified" MapCode). * It's super easy to read to someone over the phone, or type in from a business card, or transcribe from a sign. A couple of uses immediately spring to mind: * Telling an Uber/Taxi/rideshare where to pick you up when you don't have GPS/data. * Telling a delivery drone where to deliver your package (without having to correctly remember dozens of digits of lat/long). * And of course what it was designed for, entering a navigation location quickly. I'm sure there are some implementation flaws, which may or may not be fatal, but I think it's pretty great.
- frankus 12y ago
  One more use case: When an address doesn't reliably geocode across mapping providers. I've run into this with things like campgrounds or tourist attractions in rural areas in the US and Canada, even with Google Maps but especially Apple Maps in the early days.
tzaman 12y ago
Seems similar to Naymit: http://www.naymit.com/ http://www.naymit.com/
spilk 12y ago
why not use already-established grid systems instead of making a new one? MGRS is commonly used in the US military and does the same thing.
sneak 12y ago
There are already a dozen of these lat/lon encoding schemes. Please go support/evangelize one of the existing ones before making a fourteenth incarnation.
jimktrains2 12y ago
There is still a special place in my heart for UTM [0]. MapCodes seem to be based on a similar concept (grid, sub grid, sub-subgrid), but with a bit shorter representation. The thing that worries me about using mapcodes, however, is what seem to be the arbitrary borders, order of girds, and the up-keep required for usage. [1] There is nothing to stop us from creating shorter UTM Codes, though. Assume 0->33 represented by 0 0 0 0 ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 Same as Map Codes [2] The CN Tower is at * WGS84: 43°38′33.24″N 79°23′13.7″W, (26 chars) * UTM: 17N 630084 4833438 (18 chars) * "Shortened" UTM: T.N.SBB6.DW9F8 (13 chars) * Map Code: CAN PYLK.XY8P [3] (13 chars) So I guess the utility of such a complex system is lost on me when something like UTM, that can be decoded with minimal effort, is just as good. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_c... [1]: http://www.mapcode.com/mapcode_documentation.doc http://www.mapcode.com/mapcode_documentation.doc [2]: http://www.mapcode.com/alphabets.html http://www.mapcode.com/alphabets.html [3]: http://www.mapcode.com/getcoords.html?iso3=112&ifrom=aboutmc http://www.mapcode.com/getcoords.html?iso3=112&ifrom=aboutmc
- Yardlink 12y ago
  If you use CAN-ON it's only 12 chars. But if you already know you're in Ontario it's only 5 including the dot. So that makes the difference between saying it to someone and having to write it down. Mapcode is massively shorter for local locations which is exactly what sat-nav is for. The "grids" for mapcode are human-understandable - country and state. I think a lot of HNers are thinking too much like programmers and forgetting that people need to tell each other locations and write them down. That's where mapcode is good.
- jarek 12y ago
  The CN Tower is at M5V2T6 - 6 chars This is unique within Canada and the physical area is small enough to be sufficiently useful for navigation. Add country code and it gets you to 9 or 10 chars. UK has similarly useful alphanumeric postcodes and specifying them for satnav is the norm.
fredsmith219 12y ago
I'll use my mapcode to tell my friends where to meet me. I'll use swatch internet time to tell them when to meet me. It's about as useful.

203 points by beseku 12y ago

It gave me a map code that was longer than my postcode. I'm not sure how postcodes work everywere else in the world, but in the uk they point to a specific road, so it's pretty good for navigating to a place with. I do know that in belgium they point to an area, so they're not as good as a navigation aid.

linker3000 12y ago
ISTR that UK postcodes narrow things down to around 15 properties.
xxxmadraxxx 12y ago
I live in quite a big block of maisonettes. At the maximum map zoom level, trying to pin down the exact location of my particular house gave me about three options to choose from –just by moving the cursor a few mm in any direction. So what happens then? Do I pick the mapcode I like best? Does some central body decide which is my 'official' mapcode? Living in the UK, I don't see what this offers over my postcode, which identifies my location to within a couple of houses. The houses across the street have a different postcode to me as do my neighbours three doors away. Theoretically* all anyone needs to find me is my house number and postcode. Try it. Send me a postcard: madra 84A <----- house no. M15 6FD <----- postcode England *Actually, it's not theoretical. I have as an experiment in the past sent someone a letter addressed just to their house number and postcode and it got there. In spite of that I do tend to write out fuller addresses though. It just seems a bit too 'minimalist' relying on only the postcode.

beseku 12y ago

Subtitle taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10975625/Did-TomTom-just-kill-the-postcode.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10975625/Did-TomT...

judk 12y ago
Ah. That makes the title+link less obnoxiously self-Betteridged, but still obnoxiously Betteridged.
dang 12y ago
It's against the HN guidelines to editorialize in titles, even when the editorialization was done by somebody else. This one was particularly bad because the submitted title ("Did TomTom founders just kill the postcode?") caused the post to receive a barrage of user flags.

jgrahamc 12y ago

Similar idea: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/1010-code.html

micheljansen 12y ago
Nice idea to include a check digit. Mapcode doesn't have that (though they recommend specifying the country separately). On the other hand, with only 4 characters, Mapcode should be easy enough to remember.

drsintoma 12y ago

So what's the upside of this vs Geohash? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

hnha 12y ago
patents and ambiguity where you have to also mention the country and sometimes, but just sometimes, the state.
quantized 12y ago
Pros of MapCodes vs. Geohashes: * MapCodes are shorter by 200-300% for a given accuracy level, assuming each MapCode is prefixed by a two-letter country code for clarity. Cons of MapCodes vs. Geohashes: * MapCodes only offer one accuracy level, of apprx. 100 m^2 regions, whereas a Geohash can be arbitrarily accurate. * MapCodes do not guarantee persistence. They can be redefined at any time, for any reason, at the sole discretion of the project designer, leaving you with a nonreferential or falsely referential code. * MapCodes do not encode location data within the code, so access to the server is required at all times. If you lack internet access, or if the service is DDoSed, hacked, goes out of business, etc. your codes become useless.

crazy1van 12y ago

The associated patent application: http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013057221A1?cl=en http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013057221A1?cl=en

cabalamat 12y ago
According to <http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html> http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html>: > The mapcode system is a free, open standard. Which is it, open or patent-encumbered? It can't be both.

axyjo 12y ago

No. They serve entirely different purposes.

Zikes 12y ago
Yep, if this were feasible as a postcode then we'd have switched to lat/long addresses ages ago.

codeduck 12y ago

Mapcodes are a free, open way to make every house or location on Earth addressable by a short code. With nothing else except your mapcode, for instance, a navigation system will bring someone to within meters of your front door. So what happens if you live in a multi-story block of flats?

micheljansen 12y ago
Presumably, for car navigation, that doesn't matter (that's what the address is for).
bitJericho 12y ago
I think this is to improve on postal codes, not address multiple-person dwellings. The flat/apt/suite number would take care of that.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

tonymillion 12y ago

I hereby invoke Betteridge's law of headlines. (unless they can convince every postal service in the world to throw away hundreds of years of dogma)

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Wouldn't this change the entire address and number? The problem is, you can't find a place without a GPS (or another digital device) :-(

contingencies 12y ago
You are correct. This is the real problem. (They even use an Indian business card as an example...)

grey-area 12y ago

Objections: 1. This mapcode is country specific (!) 2. Many locations need altitude or fine lat,lon differences to differentiate them (e.g. blocks of flats, offices). 3. What's wrong with altitude, lat and lon on a given projection which can be as precise/imprecise as you want? IMO it'd be better to have a hash of lat,lon,altitude which was globally unique for each level of precision. A system like this needs to be globally unique without specifying country, or you may as well use a postcode. The only advantage over postcodes at present is it's slightly shorter.

sp332 12y ago
It's a bit buried, but only some of the mapcodes are country-specific. "Every location on Earth has an "international" mapcode, completely independent of territorial borders. So any location that has a national mapcode also has an international mapcode." http://www.mapcode.com/popup_alts.html http://www.mapcode.com/popup_alts.html
jisaacso 12y ago
There exists a hash of lat, long globally unique for each level of precision, a geohash [1]. One common application utilizes a space filling Hilbert curve to define an arbitrary precision bounding box around a set of coordinates. You can see an example hash [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.org/9q8yyvfekk8h http://geohash.org/9q8yyvfekk8h
- grey-area 12y ago
  I reckon you need to include latitude as well, or it's not really going to be useful for specifying position in cities.
- javadocmd 12y ago
  If you'll pardon the reckless self-promotion, there's a few Java implementations to do Geohash calculations: https://code.google.com/p/simplelatlng/ https://code.google.com/p/simplelatlng/
- mxfh 12y ago

giergirey 12y ago

Another interesting similar idea - http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ .

vjvj 12y ago

There is already a service like this that uses 3 words instead of that weird string: http://what3words.com http://what3words.com

kordless 12y ago
Come find me at premium.gravely.pies.

hawleyal 12y ago

Terrible site design

PaulHoule 12y ago

It doesn't replace the post code by any means, but it's definitely a nice way to program a GPS.

ekidd 12y ago

Overall, this looks pretty interesting, assuming your goal is to communicate physical locations with an accuracy of a couple of meters using a format that fits on a business card. It can also be used without country names, if you prefer it that way (just select "International" when generating the code.) Developer downloads here: http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V This is patented, with an ISO standard in progress, and the following licensing terms (from their developer page): The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way that would result in the production of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in any way to generate a different system that produces codes to represent locations. In order to prevent misuse, unauthorised alterations, copying or commercial exploitation, please note that the ideas and algorithms behind the mapcode system have been patented and that the term "mapcode" is a registered trademark of the Stichting Mapcode Foundation. Part of the motivation is the lack of usable postcodes in many countries: Unfortunately, a large part of the world population has no address. In India alone, well over half a billion people live in houses that have no street name. They play some interesting tricks with population density and country "contexts" to shorten codes: 4. People live within a “country context”. Addresses seldom include a country name. Unless clearly stated otherwise, they can safely be assumed to be in “this” country. Codes that are known to be within a particular territory can be designed to be much shorter. 6. Short codes are reserved for areas where the population density is high.

ff7c11 12y ago
They call it ...a free, open way to make every house ... and then they say The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way not very open

jxf 12y ago

I'm a little confused about what this replaces, but it's definitely not postcodes. * Postcodes have a specific meaning: they're both a geographical area and a mail delivery zone (at least in the US). Replacing one short code with another, which requires a different and less reliable third-party service to correctly decode, doesn't seem like a good idea. * Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous, well-understood, and don't require a third-party service to be online in order to correctly decode. So it doesn't seem like this can replace latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation. * Broadly speaking, while addresses have a lot of problems, they're unambiguous with human context. So this doesn't seem like it really replace addresses either. * For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"), I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. That might be very helpful. Also, won't there be multiple mapcodes for a single spot and won't that require cross-association of the respective metadata? For example, consider that Central Park is also in Manhattan, also part of NYC, also in Midtown in NYC, etc. I guess that's not necessarily a problem, but it could lead to a lot of expensive processing for frequently updated locations/boundaries (e.g. a beach, a suburban development in progress, etc.).

diydsp 12y ago
> latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation. That's a much smarter idea than this mapcode system. It would make sense to replace the base-10 representation with base 36.... at least in the Roman alphabet. It would probably be smarter to pick a base that works with the world's alphabets. Oh yeah, not all the world uses alphabets! But even then, it's not that huge of an improvement, really! Every two digits of base 36 replace three digits of base 10. (36^2 = 1296). The b36 digits replace only 4 (or 4.5) base 10 digits. 4x b36 digits replace 6 base 10 digits. I think this may actually just be the Ham radio grid system I mentioned elsewhere. > For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"). Here, I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. Heh, at this point, I'm just thinking "URL". After all, it's a Universal resource locator. How about mapcode://CentralPark/my_favorite_bench.

tinco 12y ago

It's hard to get an understanding of the precise algorithm that's being used to generate the code. If it were a competitor of the postcode it would have to be possible to identify whether two places are close to eachother just by looking at the code right? From the patent I get the feeling that it's a bit like a C-ary space partitioning, where C is 36 (alphabet+numbers). So the first character divides the earth in 36 regions, the second character divides that region in 36 regions, and so on. With that in mind, I think once people would be a bit familiar with the general numbers for regions it would be pretty easy to identify what general region a mapcode would be in. So it might be a pretty good replacement of postcodes. Or am I missing some other fundamental property of postcodes?

orbifold 12y ago
I think that postcodes divide a country not evenly but are chosen by population density and the distribution structure of the post provider. Look at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Karte_Briefzentren_Deutsche_Post_AG.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Karte_Bri... for example, each distribution center is responsible for one or two double digit prefixes, the first digit roughly indicates the region. Areas with high population density have a much finer coverage. I don't think there would be any benefit from switching to Map Codes, as they have to be mapped to something like post codes anyways and they are not precise enough to serve as residential addresses.

ascorbic 12y ago

No, because postcodes aren't primarily geographical references. They just happen to be really useful for that. UK postcodes are arranged so that each one handles a similar amount of mail. This means that a residential street may share one or two postcodes, but a large organisation may have several postcodes to itself.

diydsp 12y ago

" A short address for any location on Earth" It doesn't check out: Surface Area of Earth: 510.1 * 10^6 km^2 Distinct map codes: 36^5 = 60.466176 * 10 ^6 Area of 1 map code = 8.4 km^2 Oh! It's narrowed by country... so it doesn't address any location on Earth. Only populated areas. If you want to actually refer to ANY location on Earth, there's another system, Ham Radio grids. It uses four to six digits and refers to either 70x100 or 3x4 miles squared. Probably useless for the business purposes, but at least it truthfully refers to any location on Earth.

pilsetnieks 12y ago
It is actually every area, and the length of the codes varies. I'm guessing that the most popular/populated places get the shortest codes and those further away get the longer codes. For example a location somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of Gran Canaria is International QFLQV.29KM while some place in the el Poble Sec district in Barcelona is Spain SG.YB.
abruzzi 12y ago
Its technically called the "Maidenhead Locater" and the specific format can be seen on the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

xbryanx 12y ago

This is neat, but I am confused why you wouldn't want to just tie location to geography and not country (aka nationality, a squishy and shifting idea). Why not just use UTM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...

Omni5cience 12y ago

I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/.

coder23 12y ago
Or the artificial Swatch time, which doesn't solve anything. We already have an international time, Coordinated Universal Time. It only takes to know your offset and some basic addition to convert. Converting longitude and latitude to some other character base, like someone suggested would be better.

spountzy 12y ago

A lot to do about their map design. But it is quite quick in finding locations.

ing33k 12y ago

startup based on similar idea ( Based in Hyderabad / India ) http://zip.pr/ http://zip.pr/

pgt 12y ago

https://www.waytag.com/ https://www.waytag.com/ is a ZA startup that's been around for a few years. On a cursory glance, this seem quite similar? I don't think WayTag ever gained much traction.

sinak 12y ago

The TomTom founders definitely didn't "just kill the postcode." > Mapcodes were developed in 2001 by Pieter Geelen and Harold Goddijn, soon after the GPS satellite signals were opened up for civilian use. It was decided to donate the mapcode system to the public domain in 2008. Can we get an update to the click-baity title?

coin 12y ago
GPS was always available for civilian use since day one. Perhaps they meant when GPS's Selective Availability (degregration of accuracy civilians) was turned off, which was in 2000.

alixaxel 12y ago

Seems very similar to the NAC: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/ http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/

callesgg 12y ago

My first instinct was: bad idea. But then when I thought about it is actualy something that has troubled my quite some times. Lat and longitudes are perfectly fine but in general they are to "simple" for people to use. When I think of a location in the world I generally think of the country cause I know to some extent where most country's are located. For example I would to describe some place in Miami I would describe it as in the lower right side of US and continue to work downwards from that.

linker3000 12y ago

I started work on something pretty much like this about 5 years ago but never pursued it for various reasons. I still have one of the registered domains with nothing to show for my preliminary work: www.tinynav.co.uk I got as far as designing the encoding scheme, including a database of point types (house, utility pole, ancient monument, park, private event etc..), together with special codes for corporates to use for all their shops, fast food outlets etc. I had the database tables worked out, populated the locations table with open source/public domain data such as civil and commercial airports and some other stuff. There was a front end that allowed for time-limited one-offs for things like 'Jo's birthday party', but then life took over!

brokenrhino 12y ago
That sounds really great. I like the time limited parts. Things like concerts or art fairs always much up foursquare locations.

lucb1e 12y ago

Honestly, I don't like it. At first I thought it was a short, sort of binary (at least machine-readable) representation of coordinates. A,A might be (0,0) in our coordinate system. Turns out it's not. It's not even global but country (or in the US, state) specific. This means that the locations are controlled by a single entity together with country codes. Sure, postal codes are controlled by a single entity too, but at least they are regulated by the government using tax money instead of an arbitrary self-appointed committee. I know it's meant to replace postal codes and not coordinates, but I'd like to see something that actually represents a place instead of an arbitrarily shaped region. OpenStreetMap's homepage happens to do this for their short URLs: http://osm.org/go/0GFeWn2RJ http://osm.org/go/0GFeWn2RJ Try moving on the OpenStreetMap map with the share menu opened and the short URL option selected. You'll see how it influences the short URL. But anyway, back to replacing postal codes: the main advantage of this is that it'd be a universal and short code. In The Netherlands you could specify: NL 6114HT 41 and you'd have house number 41 at the Marktstraat (market street) in Susteren (city). Not much longer. And with this new system you'd still need to look up country-specific codes so I don't see much of an advantage.

microcolonel 12y ago
Mapcodes are coordinates within a rectangular region, you define the region, then the code(or if you're IN the region, you don't need to worry about defining it). One of the available regions is "Earth", which offers global coordinates(they're a bit longer, four or five characters on each side of the dot). The upside of this is that it is possible to implement it completely offline, you don't need to query the regions from a database, because they're already defined. You just run the algorithm to project the local coordinates onto global coordinates, and your GPS system will handle that.
- grey-area 12y ago
  One of the available regions is "Earth", which offers global coordinates(they're a bit longer, four or five characters on each side of the dot). Why not just use lat, lon, which can be shorter too? Central park, NY - 40.78 -73.97 Hyde Park, LON - 51.51, -0.17

Shish2k 12y ago

> The mapcode foundation reserves the right to change the country list and population density maps, at which point existing codes will point to different places or be invalid Nope.jpg

mseebach 12y ago
From the docs: "[This] issue should be prevented at all costs. The second [adding new countries] may be necessitated by changes to the world order, i.e. new countries coming into being. But unless changes are made by a single central authority, the first issue will quickly come to be."

nakedrobot2 12y ago

No.

basicallydan 12y ago

No, they didn't. They "killed" parts of addresses. Also, these are still hard to remember. Personally, I'm a fan of http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/ I'm currently here: http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent

chippy 12y ago
I like what3words also. What I'd really like is a hierarchy so that given >lives.fend.spent when you saw the words >lives.fend.rabbi you knew it was nearby, within the "fend" place or that >lives.gopher.spoon was within the "lives" places
- hnha 12y ago
  Sounds like usa.newyork.brooklyn would be a smart extension. Quick, let me patent it and trademark the term "3 or more words that describe a location in hierarchical order". Or maybe I will just call it "backwaddress". :P
- basicallydan 12y ago
  Hey, that is a cool idea. It's basically a less verbose address system isn't it?

paul_f 12y ago

What problem does this solve, exactly?

lstamour 12y ago
From their reference doc: > The mapcode system was revived and worked out in 2006 when TomTom decided to expand their operations to countries like India and China. It was difficult to sell navigation devices in these countries, among other things because a significant part of the population lives without address, lacking not just house numbers but often even street names, which often made it hard or even impossible to enter a destination. It was thought that the introduction of a simple and ubiquitous system for representing locations (and hence destinations) would in due time make navigation devices as welcome there as anywhere else.

viraptor 12y ago

> What is a mapcode? [...] They are precise to a few meters, which is good enough for every-day use. Yeah, but so are the British post codes. 6-7 symbols and you're down to meters usually. At least for the cities. They definitely bring you close to the front doors.

fixermark 12y ago

It's unfortunate that their map-encoding solution appears to be based on TomTom's dataset, instead of Google Maps. It therefore thinks my house is my neighbor's house. Open Street Map is, sadly, no better, thinking my house is a different neighbor's house.

chippy 12y ago
OpenStreetMap's better in that you can correct it yourself or leave a note for someone else to fix
- fixermark 12y ago
  That's possible with Google Maps also (http://www.google.com/mapmaker http://www.google.com/mapmaker) But thank you for noting that I can do the same with OSM. After making an account and logging in, I've created a feature-point for my address, but I don't see a way to correct or suppress the incorrect information from OpenStreetMap Nominatim. shrug Problem for another day.
  - chippy 12y ago
    Hmm, I think that Nominatim gets updated with a bit of lag (minutes to an hour), so the address should be there now? Assuming you changed the information from the map, it should update it within Nominatim, as it get's it's info from the map If not, you can leave a note http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/new http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/new and someone can take a look at it. I've been contributing for a while now and still like using Notes to let people with more techy experience or local knowledge help.
    - fixermark 12y ago
      Looks like it's updated. Thank you for the tip!
maxerickson 12y ago
If OpenStreetMap being wrong really bothers you, you can fix it. I mean to point that out in an abstract sense more than I mean to implore you to do so. As a rule, address data in OSM is very incomplete and the Nominatim instance on osm.org falls back to things like TIGER data to do geocoding. If you are in a region where there are a lot of addresses present in the OSM data, it would be great if you could at least drop a note nearby stating that the addresses in the area have problems (it's the button shaped like a cartoon word balloon, on the right hand side of the page). (Housenumbers show up when zoomed in, if they aren't showing, then the OpenStreetMap website is showing you results based on some fallback data.)

gkoz 12y ago

The choice of Cyrillic translations seems arbitrary to me. There is a well known Morse code convention (Q=Щ, V=Ж, W=В, X=Ь, Y=Ы).

blahedo 12y ago
The problem with e.g. W=В or X=Ь is that they want glyph matching; so the roman alphabet B and the cyrillic alphabet В (even though they are different letters) map to each other, to avoid having same-looking codes map to different locations. They're solving a slightly different problem than the Morse convention was trying to solve.

cabalamat 12y ago

> Areas claimed by two countries are simply included in both contexts. If I understand this correctly, it means that any address in a disputed territory has multiple mapcodes, one for each claimant, and therefore whichever one you use you are implicitly backing one political claim over the others. If so, this is a potential can of worms that many people won't want to open.

wspeirs 12y ago

I guess today is the day for talking about encoding locations on earth on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053032

qwerta 12y ago

ZIP code is also used in astronomy: http://healpix.sourceforge.net/ http://healpix.sourceforge.net/

deltaqueue 12y ago

Having traveled to several countries without formal addresses, this looks like a godsend for navigation. It has no regional segmentation (i.e. no drill-down reference like country-state-zip-city levels), however, so it's useless as a cultural reference. Slightly off topic, but I'm stupefied at how much faster TomTom's maps (and Bing, apparently!) are than GoogleMaps.

hds 12y ago

I'm curious about what happens when a geographical location changes country. If Catalunya gains independence from Spain, will the MapCode associated with my house here in Barcelona change? Will the old "Spanish" MapCode still be valid? Speaking of current events, do Isreal and Palestine have separate MapCodes and what happens when borders shift?

davexunit 12y ago

I don't like this. From what little I have read, mapcodes appear to be proprietary, despite advertising a "free, open standard". >Mapcodes are free. They can be used by anyone, and may be supported, provided or generated by anyone, as long as this is done free of charge, conditions or restrictions Why can't someone charge money for a service that generates mapcodes? >The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way that would result in the production of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in any way to generate a different system that produces codes to represent locations. I think this means that the source code they are distributing is proprietary, because we cannot use it for any purpose.

cwp 12y ago
There's quite a bit of territory between "proprietary" and "free software, as approved by the FSF". If the MapCode sources are free for any purpose except confusing people, I'm fine with that.
justincormack 12y ago
Certainly not compatible with Debian free software guidelines.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

frankus 12y ago

I, for one, really like this. * It doesn't use postal codes, which aren't really intended for use for anything but mail delivery and occasionally make that painfully apparent (such as when the boundaries are changed) * It doesn't depend on street addresses, so it works in countries where the streets aren't reliably or intelligibly named/numbered. It also works in places where there are no streets. * It's smarter about allocating code space than something like a 10:10 code, since e.g. not a lot of people live in the middle of the ocean (and they can always use a "fully-qualified" MapCode). * It's super easy to read to someone over the phone, or type in from a business card, or transcribe from a sign. A couple of uses immediately spring to mind: * Telling an Uber/Taxi/rideshare where to pick you up when you don't have GPS/data. * Telling a delivery drone where to deliver your package (without having to correctly remember dozens of digits of lat/long). * And of course what it was designed for, entering a navigation location quickly. I'm sure there are some implementation flaws, which may or may not be fatal, but I think it's pretty great.

frankus 12y ago
One more use case: When an address doesn't reliably geocode across mapping providers. I've run into this with things like campgrounds or tourist attractions in rural areas in the US and Canada, even with Google Maps but especially Apple Maps in the early days.

tzaman 12y ago

Seems similar to Naymit: http://www.naymit.com/ http://www.naymit.com/

spilk 12y ago

why not use already-established grid systems instead of making a new one? MGRS is commonly used in the US military and does the same thing.

sneak 12y ago

There are already a dozen of these lat/lon encoding schemes. Please go support/evangelize one of the existing ones before making a fourteenth incarnation.

jimktrains2 12y ago

There is still a special place in my heart for UTM [0]. MapCodes seem to be based on a similar concept (grid, sub grid, sub-subgrid), but with a bit shorter representation. The thing that worries me about using mapcodes, however, is what seem to be the arbitrary borders, order of girds, and the up-keep required for usage. [1] There is nothing to stop us from creating shorter UTM Codes, though. Assume 0->33 represented by 0 0 0 0 ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 Same as Map Codes [2] The CN Tower is at * WGS84: 43°38′33.24″N 79°23′13.7″W, (26 chars) * UTM: 17N 630084 4833438 (18 chars) * "Shortened" UTM: T.N.SBB6.DW9F8 (13 chars) * Map Code: CAN PYLK.XY8P [3] (13 chars) So I guess the utility of such a complex system is lost on me when something like UTM, that can be decoded with minimal effort, is just as good. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_c... [1]: http://www.mapcode.com/mapcode_documentation.doc http://www.mapcode.com/mapcode_documentation.doc [2]: http://www.mapcode.com/alphabets.html http://www.mapcode.com/alphabets.html [3]: http://www.mapcode.com/getcoords.html?iso3=112&ifrom=aboutmc http://www.mapcode.com/getcoords.html?iso3=112&ifrom=aboutmc

Yardlink 12y ago
If you use CAN-ON it's only 12 chars. But if you already know you're in Ontario it's only 5 including the dot. So that makes the difference between saying it to someone and having to write it down. Mapcode is massively shorter for local locations which is exactly what sat-nav is for. The "grids" for mapcode are human-understandable - country and state. I think a lot of HNers are thinking too much like programmers and forgetting that people need to tell each other locations and write them down. That's where mapcode is good.
jarek 12y ago
The CN Tower is at M5V2T6 - 6 chars This is unique within Canada and the physical area is small enough to be sufficiently useful for navigation. Add country code and it gets you to 9 or 10 chars. UK has similarly useful alphanumeric postcodes and specifying them for satnav is the norm.

fredsmith219 12y ago

I'll use my mapcode to tell my friends where to meet me. I'll use swatch internet time to tell them when to meet me. It's about as useful.