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Plus Minus Code - WHVX+64J-MINSK
It is the same short code, except for the deterministic "minus" part containing the locality. Locality is a table lookup, so this requires adding a table with localities the the standard. Filtered by population (>1mln people or the largest city in the square) to keep the list short. The has few advantages.
- Plus Minus Codes can be decoded by offline tools
- The code become machine readable (unlike short Plus Code with locality) and long code more human readable
Short Plus Ccodes with locality like "WHVX+64J, Minsk, Belarus" are not machine readable, because it is impossible to understand if text after the first comma is locality without making a request to external service. With Plus Minus Code WHVX+64J-MINSK you don't need the external heuristics.
This repository is related to plus codes. What you are referring to is not a plus code. I recommend that this issue be closed as out of project scope.
@fulldecent this is a proposed backward compatible extension to Google's plus code. Where should I send it to if not this project?
I think the Google Groups makes sense https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code
From (newly updated) https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/FAQ#reference-location-dataset : The open source libraries support conversion to/from addresses using the latlng of the reference location. Callers will need to convert place names to/from latlng using a geocoding system.
Providing a global dataset isn't within scope of this project. For a potential free alternative, see Open Street Map and derived geocoding service Nominatim.
Not sure I need plus codes then. https://what3words.com/ looks like a good alternative.
Not sure I need plus codes then. https://what3words.com/ looks like a good alternative.
Depends on your use case. Ultimately W3W is not open source, nor is it scalable (i.e. variable granularity/accuracy) and it's not free. Its also not (IMHO) as easy to integrate into a database given the variable string lengths 🤷🏻♂️
