Composite image of the Earth at night.

I’ve been looking a lot at the way we locate things, through maps and through the naming of things. Our addresses are weird things to begin with. We usually start by naming the place we are in and then move outwards in increments into the world around us. It shows some of the evolution of our idea of position.

In the past we wrote our address and most of the people who read it would know within the first few words who and where we were: “Oh that’s Joe who lives in the next village over” they would say, and that would be an end of it. They wouldn’t have to think about Counties, States, or Countries. Who talked to people in other countries anyway, except kings and their like?

Nowadays the world has grown smaller, and in many ways it would be preferable to have an address that narrowed with each phrase, each increment bringing the sender closer to the addressee. In the online world, our lovely folk-evolved addresses seem more trouble than they’re worth. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little code we could parse?

Well, of course, some such mechanisms exist, but many of them are old things that evolved out of archaic postal systems and are still maintained for those systems. What should it matter to me how a postman is routed from his supply depot?

Something like Geohash on the other hand provides a code for all places on the earth, much like latitudes and longitudes, and to a high degree of accuracy – it’s a sphere, it’s not too hard. So, we can easily choose one system for everywhere on earth, and not have different systems for the UK, USA, China, India, etc. Just one common system.

We can then leave it up to each postal service to translate that system to their old postal code thingy, and we have no barrier to entry to the finding places game. The resulting addresses are nice and simple too, but even though the code-to-place procedure becomes more open and accessible, it would still be nice not to have to type a code into a phone to find out you are going just round the corner. Well, a Wikipedia type thing (not Wikipedia though, we’re not all worth an encyclopedia entry) could easily map locations to names, and using semantic web structures we could get to know a lot about each place we bother to name.

My own country (Ireland) has always been blessed by the ability of putting things off for a long time. Sometimes this enables it, when it finally gets round to doing things, to adopt systems unencumbered by legacy. So, if we choose to have an encoding for places, why not use Geohash or an equivalent?

If the Irish postal system wants to connect their own system to this it should be relatively simple, and we won’t be left with some debacle like those poor people in the UK, whose once public, now private(-ish) postal system had it’s postcode system adopted as a de facto identifier standard, even though it’s not a particularly good identifier, except for delivering mail. And just to make matters worse, their government, who are supposedly interested in unlocking innovation through free access to public sector data and information, continue to allow the postal system to charge for access to the postcode system!

Thank god my government is bound to:

  • Learn from this, and not spend millions on some new weird standard.
  • Choose, or make, a freely available system.
  • Quickly reap the benefits.

That’s what we’re going to do, right?…

Tim.