I came up with an open source alternative to a well funded market segment.
Encoding geographic coordinates into a string is a trivial thing. Yet, there are many grid based systems (geohash, PlusCodes, Mapcodes), and some even turn the thing into a business (Zippr, What3Words). I agree with the commonly stated motivation that Latitude and Longitude are not sufficient for identifying a place in both an unambiguous and human friendly way. A single string for this pair of numbers is a better representation, if only it can preserve all the information contained in the original latitude,longitude pair, something no existing geo-encoding system does. That's my goal.
GeoCode is an open source Geolocation Code, mapping (latitude,longitude) to {(one alphanumeric number) or (three geonames)}.
Let me know if you'll find it useful.
Interesting, didn't know that encoding coordinates into a better way was a thing, but makes sense.
What I noticed: I think it's better when the map shows something at the beginning (and is not placed somewhere in the ocean by default). Also it took me some time until I noticed I could click on the lat, long coordinates.
How are the 2nd and 3rd geoname parts generated? The first is the city, but after that I cannot really see a pattern...
It is a thing indeed! Especially one company has gained a lot of attention (and raised over $20 million) in the last couple of years - What3words. They assign 3 random words to a location. There are a few others two, and Google has developed their own location encoding system (Plus Codes).
In 3geonames, only the first name is the most prominent location name in its vicinity, the rest are quasi-random.
This is still beta though, and I'm thinking of ways to make it more intuitive. Thanks for the suggestions.
very interesting, thanks for the explanation!