Fourwords, a free open human and machine friendly global positioning standard

1 pointsposted 41 minutes ago
by fish43

1 Comments

fish43

32 minutes ago

its base 1024 - perfect for byte size coordinate sharing - compared to traditional latitude and longitude floats, the FourWords Base-1024 system is massively more efficient—reducing storage requirements by up to 68% per point.

Its also more efficient than what 3 words as each word is only 4 characters. The co-ordinates are proximity aware - calculating distances and sorting the coordinates is "built-in" making approximate distance caculation very simple.

There is structure in the format - the words communicate proximity. The machine readable format is ultra compact. I am not sure it is possible to compress coordinates even more.

The fourth order is accurate to about 19 metres - which is generally down to a single address or at most three in dense areas. but in terms of road position for cab hailing (for example) it is accurate enough.

There is also some space available in the encoding standard by adding a fifth order for sub-metre accuracy.