3 ms·
Classic example is emergency services. Having the ability to turn your location into three words that will easily survive communication over a phone with dodge
by avianlyric 6y ago
Classic example is emergency services.
Having the ability to turn your location into three words that will easily survive communication over a phone with dodge signal is very useful.
You could argue that that lat/lon or a street address should be fine. But memorising a two sequences of numbers, then repeating them accurately over a poor phone line is hard.
Street addresses are also hard, there’s frequently not a nearby road sign, or worse, the road name is ambiguous (your city may have multiple streets with the same name). Hell there’s no guarantee that the emergency services even have your street name in their database if it’s a new street, or it’s name was changed recently.
So basically any scenario where you need to transmit a location accurately between two parties who are operating two different mapping systems, and communicating over an unreliable comms link (phone, radio etc), is a good use case for W3W. W3W is like the phonetic alphabet for locations.
Personally I hate the fact the W3W are extracting rents from this services. But I can’t deny the utility of their service.
- tobr 6y agoThat’s honestly incredibly far-fetched. I need to have a GPS and a device that is able to do the conversion from lat/long to words. Given that prerequisite there are about a dozen better ways to solve the issue. Both me and the emergency services in the area need to know what these word codes are, or we’re spending time explaining that in an emergency situation. The ability to use it offline is nice but assumes that I prepared for that ahead of time. Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals etc, that would have been a different thing. Also, emergency services are local, but this system wastes bandwidth on being able to describe any location in the world.
- anticensor 6y ago> Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals etc, that would have been a different thing. Not only that, the word list is localised in different languages, and those are untranslatable as each locale uses a different coefficient table.