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Which is why w3w is a really novel approach to this: https://what3words.com/ https://what3words.com/
by mbesto 9y ago
Which is why w3w is a really novel approach to this: https://what3words.com/ https://what3words.com/
- theDoug 9y agoAs far as I can see, this seems to be a "global solution" which only outputs English
- jpatokal 9y agoNo, they're already localised into 22 languages: https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/203105501-How-many-languages-are-you-in- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/203105501-H... But what3words is proprietary and requires licensing, while Google's codes are open source. Disclaimer: I used to work on Google Maps, including geocoding, but not this initiative.
- eat_veggies 9y agoThey're private, proprietary, and online (it can decode regular three word combos offline, but the one word special locations need web access). Switching the order of words results in totally different locations. Google gave the example of "banana rabbit monkey" being in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" in Russia [0]. And while it's localized to more languages than just English, the friction when exchanging location data across language barriers seems problematic. For example, giving an English speaker something like "пропан.зачет.некий." in an image, spoken, or written on paper would be totally opaque and hard to even enter with a US keyboard, let alone commit to memory. [0] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems#web-based-services https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...