What Three Words - Global Addressing System

[JeffWard]

I saw a tweet today about immigration offices in Thailand having three word addresses and was directed to this site - www.what3words.com.

I watched the video and checked out the map.  It is an intriguing system, I was wondering what you folks thought about it.

I assign addresses in my position as well as deal with addresses in error, or people that don't know their address (it happens more than you would think).  Remembering three words would be easier than a number a street a city a state/province and a postal code.

There's less to screw up, but my initial thoughts are spelling and transposition.  Also regardless of how much easier it is to remember three words you still need to get there using the transportation network.  Emergency personnel can use parts of a traditional address to know the general location of an incident whereas with three random (and they are random) words nobody is going to know where that is until they plug it into the web site.

What do you think about it?

[MarkShymanski]

Thank you for your well thought out response.  I also do a lot of addressing for my job (I am the GIS manager for our local ambulance command and control centre) and can understand, and share, your interest in unique addressing schemes.  I recall when I first learned about W3W and remember being quite intrigued at the time.  Interestingly we use as part of our provincial addressing scheme the Dominion Land Survey's 'Section-Township-Range' for parts of our province. It is a great system for allocating land but is a horrible system for wayfinding in much the same way as W3W would be.  As identified earlier (both in this thread and in time 🙂 the lack of a topological relationship between the referenced cells is what really limits this method as an effective wayfinding tool.  It was interesting to learn that the US military included this method as a 'backup' addressing scheme for their operations, that would certainly make me take a second look at this method if we were seeking another wayfinding tool.

Mark