I'd love it if it also supported modifying the URLs, since they are so readable. For example, if I delete the 199 from the end of your URL [1], it should still show me Valencia St. on the map. However, in its current state, I don't think the app parses any incoming URLs from the location field.
At first, I thought that the address indicated what Google assumed was my geographic location, but a quick search returned, "The Zeitgeist Bar" in San Francisco.
I'm using iconv to convert from utf-8 to ascii, but the transliteration isn't as complete as I'd like. :( Sorry it strips out prague addresses.
I tried using utf-8 urls but I couldn't work out how to handle them in rails.
Actually, looking at the search term you entered, I must have a bug, because the iconv output is correct, it definitely shouldn't be stripping letters out of the url.
I could have used UTF-8, and made the URL http://archäologie-oö.info/orte/hörsching, but then all of the sudden 95% of the worlds population couldn't type that URL anymore.
sure but they could have easily replaced all the problematic characters by "simpler ones" like é,è->e, œ -> oe
having an address (in France) containing some of these characters the deletion make it barely readable, therefore useless since the goal is to have understandable urls
The biggest problem with geocoding is that not all places have addresses. Especially in the developing/third world.
It also lacks a lot of things I normally link friends to in Google Maps. For example when giving directions I always link to the street view of the main entrance.
Geocoding is about turning a textual reference into a grid reference. Without some textual reference you can't geocode. The real problem is a lack of methods for expressing uncertainty from a known definite benchmark.
Cool. I'm working on something similar: http://addressaddress.com (be gentle, still work in progress). I've mostly tested it with Swedish addresses, so might be problems with US ones.
Same here.
But when I edited the URL to include my hometown, of which there are 3 places sharing the same name, the inclusion of a zip code returned the correct map.
I understand the need for a nice URL, perhaps indicative of RESTfulness, but I see a few problems with this:
1. From a REST point of view - the map is the resource. The adddress is well, not really a resource (the logic goes like this: if the address is the resource, the browser as a resource getter should only get the address, not the surrounds). IMHO the address should be modelled as an element of the resource, accessible by Maps' javascript.
2. Of course you can have nice URLs without being indicative of RESTfulness. Consider an address in Japan. They do not have road names, instead, they use building/block numbers for naming/addressing. While that can still be modelled as a nice URL, the convention is now flipped, and people will be confused
3. Consider that some places do not actually have an address. Like my former residence. Due to changes in the roads, my place had a new road with no name, and no actual address (well, eventually it did, and the road still has no name. Getting pizza delivered was tough)
What can be done of course is a bit.ly kind of thing, which I think will work. Something like /maps/199-valencia-street-san-francisco-california-united-states. The current google maps url is already kinda like that (with ?q I believe)
My understanding is that "nice URLs" and "RESTfulness" are orthogonal. Difference implementations of the same RESTful interface could have completely different URL formats and they should all be compatible with clients written to the interface specification.
Having said that, best to have nice URLs and RESTfulness.
It's in some ways quite anti-RESTful for a consuming client to start to try parsing a URL semantically. "URL building" is not something a client should be responsible for, it should be (semi-)blindly using URLs the service has provided for it.
Agreed and well said. Nice URLs do not have to be RESTful, but RESTful URLs have to be nice. Personally, its just OK for me if the entire URL looks like:
> Consider an address in Japan. They do not have road names, instead, they use building/block numbers for naming/addressing. While that can still be modelled as a nice URL, the convention is now flipped, and people will be confused
It's not flipped at all. Japanese addresses go big -> small, just like the URL. As a matter of fact, the US addresses are flipped since US addresses go the other way.
> (the logic goes like this: if the address is the resource, the browser as a resource getter should only get the address, not the surrounds).
The browser doesn't retrieve the resource, it returns a representation of the resource. A map centered on a location is a valid representation of a resource identified by an address.
This might seem nice for the USA but it would fail miserably in other places (or require different URL schemes). I could not find a bigger discussion I remember on HN but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588289 might work as example already.
I tried searching 日本東京都足立区足立２丁目 (google suggestion) and your app doesn't accept.
we're able to get all the computers in the world to be more or less on the same network but we still can't figure out encoding problems from 1982
edit: I messed up writing this, should have been 足立区六町２丁目. Using http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/rokuch... I get the right spot, but the search box doesn't seem to work for me(but I am behind a very high-latency line, it might be my connection that is borking)
second edit: seems that the resolution is around ward-level(even when searching romanised addresses like "2-10-3 Honkomagome, Bunkyo, Tokyo", a search which works in google maps) From an intuitive standpoint, there should be no reason for this not to work, there's nothing particularly weird about the address format. I dunno
Some people in the USA tend to forget that there are other characters besides the ones the use, a little encode_url would be enough. Special Spanish characters don't work neither (áéíóúñ).
Whilst it is a nice idea to put textual labels in, and whilst it may work for grid-based cities such as those in the USA... it's really going to have a problem in Europe where many large cities are the result of growth over centuries and the merging of villages and towns into cities.
London has so much duplication in things like High Street, Church Street, Chapel Lane, Market Place... and the system outlined will just fail to disambiguate.
The only thing that could truly work on a global level is some geospatial identifier in the URL, with text that followed it. But then if the place itself was large it could span multiple geospatial points and result in duplication.
Duplication of URLs is probably better than ambiguity over what the URL points to.
PS: I tried to do a query on Open Street Map to discover how many High Streets there are in London but I hit the limit of their disambiguity service. And there are High Streets from one old village that have been extended to the point that they touch the High Street of another old village. 2 different High Streets with an almost identical postal code.
PPS: Perhaps a post-code? In the UK it's good enough to give someone a post-code and door number and you can get to their front door. How that would work globally I do not know... fine for most of the Western World, useless in India maybe, etc.
In theory there should be only one high street per locality. I didn't try the app with london urls (only berwick street which worked fine [1]). In theory if you can unambiguously write the address of a place without relying on the postcode, then you should be able to construct a unique url for the place.
It is not possible to unambiguously write all addresses in the UK without including the post code.
The post code and door number are the primary key of the data.
Edit 1:
A fine example: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=high+road%2C... Zoom out one level and you'll see that High Road is surrounded on both sides by High Street. And yes, that is correct.... High Street > High Road > High Street = One road in one very old town.
Crazily if you look down a little further you'll see the Southern High Street (A408) goes East, and what is technically another High Street heads on Southwards.
3 High Streets, and 1 High Road... in less than 1 mile in 1 town.
I was actually looking for the Church Road in Uxbridge that comes off of Church Road, but I think Google Maps incorrectly has both of them as Church Lane.
Church Lane coming off of Church Lane. One is the A312, the other is just Church Lane.
Google is wrong on this, they're both called Church Road. And historically they were the same thing, but as it evolved from a way to get to the church to a market thoroughfare one main road emerged and left the other road as a side road. Over time this actually led to both roads being distinct, and with their own door numbering schemes, even though they meet each other.
I find the history of places as fascinating as the history of languages.
The postcode and door number (or even street) is not enough in the uk unless you are in a town (and even then not always). Look up some rural postcodes, or blocks of flats with names rather than a number.
The town I grew up in had a Something St that at the top of the hill changed to a different street. A street also called Something St. Both have the same postcode. There are many duplicate house numbers.
I think they were originally separate unjoined streets. But a road was built up the hill, joining them together. I guess people couldn't agree on who should have their houses renumbered.
If manually specifying the address you probably have enough wiggle room to specify which 10 Something St you mean. I've encountered systems online that will try to normalize and correct street addresses to an official format... I could imagine that these would cause problems.
(And don't confuse those addresses with the 10 New Something St, or 10 Something Rd, both of which are only a few hundred meters away.)
High Street is a name for the most important shopping street or main thoroughfare in UK convention. I've never been to a place that had 2 high streets and certainly not 2 called High Street. [Many towns in Scotland have a sort of quadrangle of main shopping streets it seems - one is often part cobbled and called Market Street]. If an area/town/village has multiple streets of equal worth then they might be termed North and South street or named for a building like Church Street or such.
In the past having name collisions would simply be a terrible convention, nowadays we have regulations that prevent it from happening with new names (same for housing).
The Scottish village I grew up in had a High Street - but it wasn't the High Street in the sense of "most important shopping street" (or indeed in any other sense). The "most important" street was Church Street - which even had a shop and a church, whereas High Street only had one church. :-)
High Streets can also be overtaken by events. Edinburgh's High Street hasn't been the most important street for anyone other than tourists for a few hundred years.
In theory there should be only one high street per locality.
There was a story on Russian news a few weeks ago how there are multiple streets with the same name in the city of Sochi. They are tackling the problem before the olympics arrive, but your assumption is probably violated elsewhere as well.
One of the little known "Did you know" is that the primary numbers of postal areas in London were originally alphabetically sorted (which largely remains the case today unless that postal area has been extended or further sub-divided).
The thing with India is that roads didn't necessarily have names or numbers.
I navigated more by "When you're past the ornately carved and colourful chapel go straight on and do a right, turn left when you see the blue building, we're in the red one third down with the blue door.".
Some places have such details, but a lot of the towns and villages just added roads organically and wouldn't stop to centrally register them, name them, number them, assign them identifiers, etc.
> In the UK it's good enough to give someone a post-code and door number and you can get to their front door. How that would work globally I do not know
We do have post-codes in Romania but nobody ever uses them. But at least now I understand why one of my first bosses, who was from the UK, was insisting so much that me, the programmer, would implement a reverse geo-thingie that would associate a post-code to a specific physical address (this was back in 2006-2007, the golden days of web-mapping).
I applaude the effort - but there are plenty of places where this falls apart. The most glaring I can think of is Nicaragua - where addresses are described based on landmarks:
Eg "From the Calvario Church, 1 block south, half a block east"
To be fair, a lot of things fall apart in Nicaragua.
I remember visiting some distant relatives in Sweden and the directions we got were all "take the 3rd light down, and then you'll pass the park, swing a right..." There were road names, my great-aunt just didn't know them. It worked, but it was not a great system.
You got Berlin right and even split Kreuzberg off from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. It's a little buggy and your URLs should probably convert ß to ss, but I'm impressed.
For us native speakers of German, using ss instead of ß or ae instead of ä seems like no big deal. But by accepting this when dealing with Americans, we strengthen the belief that everything can be forced into ASCII, which really fucks over people from countries that are smaller markets but either have different character sets or where diacritical signs are semantically relevant. edit: spelling
Just because your native language can be expressed in ASCII, your name can be split into a first and a last name and you live in a country with grid-like streets doesn't mean that internationalization and anything related to location is easy.
People are making great points about ways to improve the service based on the way addressss vary around the world.
Could we present these as helpful suggestions, especially including one or more examples based on our local knowledge? Rather than everyone piling on with dismissive one-upmanship?
In the UK it's enough to provide a postcode and the house number to find a specific place. So you can compress:
Flat 3,
Bowsden Court,
South Gosforth,
Newcastle Upon Tyne
To:
3, NE3 1RR
And that's it, it just can't mean anything else.
However, in other countries, like Poland, a postcode is used per city, so a postcode 32-600 is not telling you much apart from the name of the town, you need to provide a full address.
The UK is pretty much an exception to the rule here though. In most other places in the world, including the US, post codes are not nearly as precise (source: worked on a real estate search engine that deals with addresses in 8 countries, including UK and India).
That's not true for most uk postcodes - many in rural areas represent an area larger than even one town, so a full address is also required. They vary from representing one address to hundreds, it's not really consistent.
It does seem strange that postcodes are not unique to addresses but they were originally just zones intended to help routing. Eventually we will probably end up with one global address space with unique identifiers for addresses like ips and dns; it would clear up a lot of ambiguity while leaving the rest of the address to function as a human readable equivalent. lat,lon doesn't really work as addresses can be on top of one another.
Almost every rule you can think of will have many exceptions in the uk as postcodes are an ad hoc scheme covering areas of varying size - my block of flats has no number, many houses have a name, not a number, many rural houses don't even have a street name or a number, just a name and hamlet name, and many rural houses share a postcode but are not on the same street or even sometimes in the same village. So postcodes are not unique to a street, nowhere near it. Here a quick search for a rural location in Scotland sharing a postcode:
There happen ( by chance ) to be two addresses sharing a number and postcode there in the first 50 addresses, but that's the least of the problems for a scheme using no + postcode as a unique id I'm afraid!
There don't seem to be any properties in that list that violate the rule? The rule is house name or number and postcode. In the cases above, there are no houses that conflict on names or numbers that I can see?
This is not a full list of addresses, but there are two no 10s there, and obviously as the postcode covers a large area with many streets, there will be some duplicate numbers, and many houses don't even have a number or street, and if you start to include house names as numbers, you will have duplicate names there too. Many addresses are as simple as rose cottage, village, POST CODE, and there might be many 'rose cottages' in that postcode.
It would be nice if it was a unique identifier, but the uk postcode is not, even combined with part of an address like 10, or even 10 high street, sometimes the village is also required to narrow it down. This might have worked for you on a limited set of data, but the assumptions are not valid across the uk.
>Many addresses are as simple as rose cottage, village, POST CODE, and there might be many 'rose cottages' in that postcode. //
This seems unlikely. In a small village people know the other house names enough to avoid a collision - in England I've a feeling Parish Councils used to keep order in this regard.
>"The Local Authority will liaise with the Royal Mail to ensure there is no conflict with names of other properties in the same street or immediate area, before formally registering the name. If there is a problem, an alternative name must be submitted. In some cases, the Local Authority may explore the possibility of a house number being registered at this point, in addition to (or instead of) the new name. Once the change has been approved, the Local Authority will normally advise relevant bodies such as the emergency services. The same procedure applies for brand new properties which, for whatever reason, cannot be numbered (however, virtually all new properties today are numbered)." //
It may seem unlikely, but that's the way it works (see better examples in the michaelt post above). Often postcodes cover more than one village, and there are thus duplicate street numbers or names. Some attempt is made to avoid clashes for new addresses, but there are plenty of existing ones. You need more than a postcode and number to identify an address, sometimes a street and/or village is also required.
Visit [1] and try DE4 4HA - addresses include "1 Council Square Brassington, MATLOCK, DE4 4HA", "1 Pleasant Cottage Miners Hill, Brassington, MATLOCK, DE4 4HA" and "1 Windyridge Red Lion Hill, Brassington, MATLOCK, DE4 4HA"
Try HD7 4PD to get "1 Moles Head, Golcar, HUDDERSFIELD, HD7 4PD" and "1 Prospect Place, Golcar, HUDDERSFIELD, HD7 4PD"
And of course there's the other direction: EC1N 8QX covers a bunch of flats in the same building, so one postcode includes "Flat G.7, Ziggurat Building, 60-66 Saffron Hill, LONDON, EC1N 8QX" and "Flat 1.1, Ziggurat Building, 60-66 Saffron Hill, LONDON, EC1N 8QX" - in other words, multiple properties have the same number within the street, and the same latitude and longitude. Also the building "number" has a hyphen, the flat "number" has a dot and can have a letter, and the building has a name too.
Not quite, in rural areas, most houses have a name. If a name is used instead of a number then the name must be unique. Obviously this doesn't affect those houses on normal suburban streets which have a number but also a name, in those cases the number is the identifier for the house.
OP suggested a simple solution to an inherently complex problem in a complex domain. Doing what you suggested is like building a quorum protocol based on some intuitive idea about how a quorum should work and then fixing "edge cases".
I took another approach to this. I have been meaning to post it to HN for a while, though it is still a little raw. I call it geokode - https://geokode.com - it is meant to be like bitly for location. You can essentially choose what your url should be for any location. This makes it very user-friendly and you can also brand your location link. Currently, you can only use English characters and numbers. I have pre-populated it with some entries (see examples below), but the goal is to get users to create their own 'geokodes' as I like to call them. I am also working on a API to make the location data available once the geokode is provided. You can even link a geokode to GPS coordinates, which will be especially useful in countries where addresses are not simple. Obviously, the site needs a lot more polish, but let me know what you think. It is currently free to register a geokode - I have to update the demo video.
Why on earth are you concerned about a point in the ocean? Do you need driving directions there? Or perhaps street view? I didn't realize most ships these days navigate with google maps
I'm sure if google implemented something like this they would still support search and linking by lat/lon.
I wish Google would improve their Google+ url's, too, now. Are they still allowing to choose your own vanity url, or did that work only for a limited time period last year?
129 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadI'd love it if it also supported modifying the URLs, since they are so readable. For example, if I delete the 199 from the end of your URL [1], it should still show me Valencia St. on the map. However, in its current state, I don't think the app parses any incoming URLs from the location field.
[1] http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-states/california/...
[2] https://maps.google.com/maps?q=199+Valencia+Street,+San+Fran...
[I attached google's original link just for reference]
https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-urls/commit/2fee561a61ede...
Na baště Svatého Jiří, 160 00 Prague-Prague 6, Czech Republic
becomes this
http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/czech-republic/hlavn-msto...
I tried using utf-8 urls but I couldn't work out how to handle them in rails.
Actually, looking at the search term you entered, I must have a bug, because the iconv output is correct, it definitely shouldn't be stripping letters out of the url.
I could have used UTF-8, and made the URL http://archäologie-oö.info/orte/hörsching, but then all of the sudden 95% of the worlds population couldn't type that URL anymore.
It also lacks a lot of things I normally link friends to in Google Maps. For example when giving directions I always link to the street view of the main entrance.
http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/congo/kasai-occidental/ka...
.../#united-states--california--
Chrome Version 24.0.1312.56 - Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Desktop)
1. From a REST point of view - the map is the resource. The adddress is well, not really a resource (the logic goes like this: if the address is the resource, the browser as a resource getter should only get the address, not the surrounds). IMHO the address should be modelled as an element of the resource, accessible by Maps' javascript.
2. Of course you can have nice URLs without being indicative of RESTfulness. Consider an address in Japan. They do not have road names, instead, they use building/block numbers for naming/addressing. While that can still be modelled as a nice URL, the convention is now flipped, and people will be confused
3. Consider that some places do not actually have an address. Like my former residence. Due to changes in the roads, my place had a new road with no name, and no actual address (well, eventually it did, and the road still has no name. Getting pizza delivered was tough)
What can be done of course is a bit.ly kind of thing, which I think will work. Something like /maps/199-valencia-street-san-francisco-california-united-states. The current google maps url is already kinda like that (with ?q I believe)
My understanding is that "nice URLs" and "RESTfulness" are orthogonal. Difference implementations of the same RESTful interface could have completely different URL formats and they should all be compatible with clients written to the interface specification.
Having said that, best to have nice URLs and RESTfulness.
It's in some ways quite anti-RESTful for a consuming client to start to try parsing a URL semantically. "URL building" is not something a client should be responsible for, it should be (semi-)blindly using URLs the service has provided for it.
maps.google.com/whatever-nice-text-describing-location?ll=lat,long
If the lat/long is missing, then ask Maps to do a search. If its present, then its just a "nice" URL. Not necessarily RESTful.
Edit: Formatting
Not by any meaningful definition of REST.
It's not flipped at all. Japanese addresses go big -> small, just like the URL. As a matter of fact, the US addresses are flipped since US addresses go the other way.
For example:
Tokyo-to (city), Taito-ku (ward), Yanagibashi (neighborhood) 2 (area)-20 (block)-2 (building) 602 (room number)
It would fit into the proposed URL scheme perfectly: Tokyo/Taito/Yanagibashi/2/20/2/602
The browser doesn't retrieve the resource, it returns a representation of the resource. A map centered on a location is a valid representation of a resource identified by an address.
https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-urls
I tried searching 日本東京都足立区足立２丁目 (google suggestion) and your app doesn't accept.
we're able to get all the computers in the world to be more or less on the same network but we still can't figure out encoding problems from 1982
edit: I messed up writing this, should have been 足立区六町２丁目. Using http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/rokuch... I get the right spot, but the search box doesn't seem to work for me(but I am behind a very high-latency line, it might be my connection that is borking)
second edit: seems that the resolution is around ward-level(even when searching romanised addresses like "2-10-3 Honkomagome, Bunkyo, Tokyo", a search which works in google maps) From an intuitive standpoint, there should be no reason for this not to work, there's nothing particularly weird about the address format. I dunno
http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/
Whilst it is a nice idea to put textual labels in, and whilst it may work for grid-based cities such as those in the USA... it's really going to have a problem in Europe where many large cities are the result of growth over centuries and the merging of villages and towns into cities.
London has so much duplication in things like High Street, Church Street, Chapel Lane, Market Place... and the system outlined will just fail to disambiguate.
The only thing that could truly work on a global level is some geospatial identifier in the URL, with text that followed it. But then if the place itself was large it could span multiple geospatial points and result in duplication.
Duplication of URLs is probably better than ambiguity over what the URL points to.
PS: I tried to do a query on Open Street Map to discover how many High Streets there are in London but I hit the limit of their disambiguity service. And there are High Streets from one old village that have been extended to the point that they touch the High Street of another old village. 2 different High Streets with an almost identical postal code.
PPS: Perhaps a post-code? In the UK it's good enough to give someone a post-code and door number and you can get to their front door. How that would work globally I do not know... fine for most of the Western World, useless in India maybe, etc.
1. http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-lo...
It is not possible to unambiguously write all addresses in the UK without including the post code.
The post code and door number are the primary key of the data.
Edit 1:
A fine example: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=high+road%2C... Zoom out one level and you'll see that High Road is surrounded on both sides by High Street. And yes, that is correct.... High Street > High Road > High Street = One road in one very old town.
Crazily if you look down a little further you'll see the Southern High Street (A408) goes East, and what is technically another High Street heads on Southwards.
3 High Streets, and 1 High Road... in less than 1 mile in 1 town.
I was actually looking for the Church Road in Uxbridge that comes off of Church Road, but I think Google Maps incorrectly has both of them as Church Lane.
Edit 2:
Here you go: http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/ub5/united-kingdom/englan...
Church Lane coming off of Church Lane. One is the A312, the other is just Church Lane.
Google is wrong on this, they're both called Church Road. And historically they were the same thing, but as it evolved from a way to get to the church to a market thoroughfare one main road emerged and left the other road as a side road. Over time this actually led to both roads being distinct, and with their own door numbering schemes, even though they meet each other.
I find the history of places as fascinating as the history of languages.
I think they were originally separate unjoined streets. But a road was built up the hill, joining them together. I guess people couldn't agree on who should have their houses renumbered.
If manually specifying the address you probably have enough wiggle room to specify which 10 Something St you mean. I've encountered systems online that will try to normalize and correct street addresses to an official format... I could imagine that these would cause problems.
(And don't confuse those addresses with the 10 New Something St, or 10 Something Rd, both of which are only a few hundred meters away.)
You will have to throw out assumptions like that as soon as you start dealing with addresses in any serious manner.
In the past having name collisions would simply be a terrible convention, nowadays we have regulations that prevent it from happening with new names (same for housing).
High Streets can also be overtaken by events. Edinburgh's High Street hasn't been the most important street for anyone other than tourists for a few hundred years.
SE20 7QR, SE25 6EP, E13 0AP, E15 2LR, W5 5DB, W3 6LJ, NW10 4SJ, N14 6BW
For a map see [2]. As you can see, plenty there are several roads the Royal Mail considers to be called High Street, London!
[1] http://www.royalmail.com/postcode-finder [2] https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=from:SE20+7QR+to:SE25+6EP+t...
There was a story on Russian news a few weeks ago how there are multiple streets with the same name in the city of Sochi. They are tackling the problem before the olympics arrive, but your assumption is probably violated elsewhere as well.
London post codes are the result of London moving from a single post town to a town with multiple towns (for the purpose of postal sorting offices).
The whole concept of a central post office broke down in the 1850s and London needed to be sub-divided to solve that.
Postal codes merely solved the routing problem between divisions, and wasn't a response to the street names problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_postal_district
One of the little known "Did you know" is that the primary numbers of postal areas in London were originally alphabetically sorted (which largely remains the case today unless that postal area has been extended or further sub-divided).
Forget India, Ireland (right beside the UK) has no postcodes.
Even within the UK (Fermanagh) postcode usage can be spotty.
I navigated more by "When you're past the ornately carved and colourful chapel go straight on and do a right, turn left when you see the blue building, we're in the red one third down with the blue door.".
Some places have such details, but a lot of the towns and villages just added roads organically and wouldn't stop to centrally register them, name them, number them, assign them identifiers, etc.
We do have post-codes in Romania but nobody ever uses them. But at least now I understand why one of my first bosses, who was from the UK, was insisting so much that me, the programmer, would implement a reverse geo-thingie that would associate a post-code to a specific physical address (this was back in 2006-2007, the golden days of web-mapping).
Eg "From the Calvario Church, 1 block south, half a block east"
http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-info/14-addresses.htm...
I remember visiting some distant relatives in Sweden and the directions we got were all "take the 3rd light down, and then you'll pass the park, swing a right..." There were road names, my great-aunt just didn't know them. It worked, but it was not a great system.
Good luck with all the address formats and disagreements about addresses (and places like Ireland where the address can be in either language).
(and Quebec maybe)
Not sure how GMaps deals with this
Apple learned it the hard way.
Could we present these as helpful suggestions, especially including one or more examples based on our local knowledge? Rather than everyone piling on with dismissive one-upmanship?
Flat 3, Bowsden Court, South Gosforth, Newcastle Upon Tyne
To: 3, NE3 1RR
And that's it, it just can't mean anything else.
However, in other countries, like Poland, a postcode is used per city, so a postcode 32-600 is not telling you much apart from the name of the town, you need to provide a full address.
e.g.
KW11 6UF
It does seem strange that postcodes are not unique to addresses but they were originally just zones intended to help routing. Eventually we will probably end up with one global address space with unique identifiers for addresses like ips and dns; it would clear up a lot of ambiguity while leaving the rest of the address to function as a human readable equivalent. lat,lon doesn't really work as addresses can be on top of one another.
http://www.192.com/places/ph/ph34-4/ph34-4eu/
There happen ( by chance ) to be two addresses sharing a number and postcode there in the first 50 addresses, but that's the least of the problems for a scheme using no + postcode as a unique id I'm afraid!
It would be nice if it was a unique identifier, but the uk postcode is not, even combined with part of an address like 10, or even 10 high street, sometimes the village is also required to narrow it down. This might have worked for you on a limited set of data, but the assumptions are not valid across the uk.
This seems unlikely. In a small village people know the other house names enough to avoid a collision - in England I've a feeling Parish Councils used to keep order in this regard.
This page suggests that Local Authories legislate (bylaws I guess) on the allowed names: http://www.housenameheritage.com/hnh_extras_officialviewlong....
Quoting that link:
>"The Local Authority will liaise with the Royal Mail to ensure there is no conflict with names of other properties in the same street or immediate area, before formally registering the name. If there is a problem, an alternative name must be submitted. In some cases, the Local Authority may explore the possibility of a house number being registered at this point, in addition to (or instead of) the new name. Once the change has been approved, the Local Authority will normally advise relevant bodies such as the emergency services. The same procedure applies for brand new properties which, for whatever reason, cannot be numbered (however, virtually all new properties today are numbered)." //
Try HD7 4PD to get "1 Moles Head, Golcar, HUDDERSFIELD, HD7 4PD" and "1 Prospect Place, Golcar, HUDDERSFIELD, HD7 4PD"
Try HD4 6XA and see "1 Broad Lane, Thurstonland, HUDDERSFIELD, HD4 6XA", "1 Blake House Thurstonland, HUDDERSFIELD, HD4 6XA", "1 Clough Cottages Thurstonland, HUDDERSFIELD, HD4 6XA", "1-2 Clough Cottages Greenside Road, Thurstonland, HUDDERSFIELD, HD4 6XA"
And of course there's the other direction: EC1N 8QX covers a bunch of flats in the same building, so one postcode includes "Flat G.7, Ziggurat Building, 60-66 Saffron Hill, LONDON, EC1N 8QX" and "Flat 1.1, Ziggurat Building, 60-66 Saffron Hill, LONDON, EC1N 8QX" - in other words, multiple properties have the same number within the street, and the same latitude and longitude. Also the building "number" has a hyphen, the flat "number" has a dot and can have a letter, and the building has a name too.
[1] http://www.royalmail.com/postcode-finder/
Some examples to highlight use cases:
https://geokode.com/*abckitchen
https://geokode.com/*disrupt
https://geokode.com/*joneswedding
https://geokode.com/*dormroomfundhq
Also, I will be at TC Disrupt in NY today in the Startup Alley in the Mobile category. Feel free to come by.
I know, nice idea, 'REST' etc, good looking.
Stop it.
As all the other comments stated, this will break down around the corner.
Country name. How do you locate a point in the ocean? What about Österreicht (easy level). ประเทศไทย (hard level)
State name. Not all countries have states. Or they're not used day to day. So in case of Ireland, do I put 'Dublin' or 'Leinster'
'Mission-dolores'? Street name? Street number?
Oh and by the way, the street numbers match the google maps position if you're lucky (it's getting better)
Why on earth are you concerned about a point in the ocean? Do you need driving directions there? Or perhaps street view? I didn't realize most ships these days navigate with google maps
I'm sure if google implemented something like this they would still support search and linking by lat/lon.
Why would I really? After all it's only 2/3 of the planet.
More realistic case: streets that haven't been mapped, rural roads.