I can't find a way to search the forums so apologies if this has been answered before...
Is there currently an easy way of using What3Words locations within iRecord or, are there plans to introduce such a feature?
Obviously 3 metre squares may not be appropriate for all circumstances but, as a standard and easy to use geolocation service, many organisations and individuals would welcome the option to use it.
Mike Creighton
Comments
Dreadful system. Recent…
Dreadful system. Recent personal experience of it being used via 999 to a person in cardiac arrest and w3w took us 400m the wrong way and hence a good 10 min delay getting to the patient with resulting poor outcome. I have colleagues on MR team and HEMS who also slate w3w and would prefer people in the countryside to learn how to use OS maps / grid refs.
And many others would not. The service suffers from significant problems with ambiguity in the addresses (e.g. from homophones and spelling variations), and it uses culturally biased word-sequences that are vulnerable to offensive/inappropriate interpretation. It's not an open standard, and it relies on proprietary software which uses a closed-source algorithm for generating the addresses. The company claims this patented algorithm reduces (but does not eliminate) the inherent ambiguity in some of the addresses. However, their estimates of its effectiveness differ quite markedly from several independent analyses (e.g. by Andrew Tierney). There's little doubt the service will become increasingly popular since it's a money-making enterprise that can afford a large advertising budget. The firm doesn't currently charge charities and emergency services to use their software, but many people are uncomfortable with the idea of a potentially essential service being owned by a private company with no public accountability. Other systems suffer from similar problems resulting from transmission errors (e.g. transposed digits in numerical coordinates) - but we're not being asked to pay for any of them.