Geolocation. Where is a world moving.

Timur Tatarshaov

Trend of the contemporary world is it be faster especially when it comes to knowledge and information exchange. First signs of that could be rooted to creation of such technologies as copy machines, phones and digital information exchange via lines and internet later. All that made incredibly fast development and spreading of new information. Long ago it wasn’t possible to see German projected house in Australia, let’s say, because it would be difficult to transfer project blueprints so far away.

So now it goes pretty well, but people are social creations, millions years of being couldn’t be easily vanished(if ever) from genes. So as a result with all that human still need to meet personally, why Skype and all other messengers is so popular? They solve this problem partially. Why Facebook bought oculus? Probably because of possibility of creation of presence simulation communication.

But still as I’ve guessed presence importance itself will not fade away. Planes made this easier, so more and more often people travel to study, exchange knowledge to work and etc. As the result human can be present in absolutely new location, without knowledge of surrounding or language or even alphabet(e.g. hieroglyphs).

So problem of navigation in this new world quickly appears. For now and for a long long time addresses were used to solve this issue. They work well and they are quite human friendly for locals, but for instant travelers whose problem we are trying to solve they could be quite meaningless especially without knowledge of local language. Second issue with addresses: they are not as accurate as needed sometimes, some particular address could belong to vary wide building so it would be difficult to find particular restaurant or office entrance in it. And another sub issue of that addresses doesn’t include vertical positioning, which usually solved with floors notation. Later two issues are consequences of the fact that addressing system has been invented long ago, when buildings usually were separate and one/two floors of height. And people doesn’t travel that far where difference between way of writing wasn’t that huge.

But today lots of things changed, almost all of the smartphones has Geolocation(GPS) module which allows to discover location of itself in relatively fast timespan. And precision of it is quite hight and improving.

So nowadays geolocation enabled devices use latitude/longitude coordinates pair to describe current location. It’s fine for machines, but not human friendly. Their length usually around 10-20 numbers(e.g. 50.069282, 14.412056) what is difficult to remember for human.

So idea behind the project is to create and spread set of standard ways of describing location both human and machine friendly.

Once algorithm is created it is possible to spread its use by means of software and hardware solutions.