Autoaddress Blog

Seduced by a Spork

The Spork is an interesting utensil, in theory equally adept at holding a piece of steak as allowing you to enjoy your soup.  What a wonderful invention!   Many people have invented a version of the Spork over the last 140 years or so, with various attempts to trademark and claim the term Spork itself.  The problems start however when you actually try to use a Spork.  If you do manage to use sufficient force to push a Spork into a piece of steak, chances are it will fall off before it reaches your mouth.  As for using it as a spoon to enjoy soup, you either get so little liquid each time that your soup goes cold or you spill it all over yourself as it leaks out of the fork tines.

Spork inventors boast how a spork is a better fork than a spoon, and a better spoon than a fork.  This misses the more important point of how poorly it compares to a spoon as a spoon or a fork as a fork.  

There is an equivalence in our industry with the inventors of algorithm based hierarchical  location codes.  These Spork inventors believe that as well as a general purpose location code their ​invention is perfect for each of the following uses:

1. A Postcode
2. Delivery Planning
3. Emergency Location Code

In reality it either completely fails to satisfy a requirement or is vastly inferior to other available options.  Let's look at an example of this type of code, from OpenPostcode


The idea is very simple, you divide Ireland into a 5 x 5 grid giving each grid a letter or number and divide each of these grids again and again until you get the required level of location accuracy.  For example our offices would receive a code of D4H9KP3 which describes a grid of 5.98m x 4.6m.    In August 2015 Google incorporated their own opensource Pluscodes into Google Maps as a general purpose location code.  The Pluscode of our office is 9C5M8PVH+G6. The Open Location Code inventors do not make extravagant claims about the code, frankly discussing the pros and cons of the design in a document here

The character set used to form Open Location Codes is not contiguous. This is a result of removing easily confused characters, vowels and some other characters. This does make manually comparing codes difficult, as one has to remember whether there are characters between 9 and C in order to tell if 8FV9 is next to 8FVC...with some practice, it is possible to estimate the direction and even very rough distances between two codes.  

Since August we have not encountered any take-up in use of Pluscodes.  So if even Google can't make this concept work what is the problem?  Does this code design work as a general purpose location code? Yes.  But is this the best ​methodology available, the  simplest way to communicate location? No. We consider what3words to be vastly superior; a worldwide solution that is easy to remember, quick and easy to communicate, and has achieved significant adoption and backing.

There are three examples of these types of algorithm hierarchical location codes in Ireland alone, whose inventors rather comically spent a lot of time arguing among themselves as to whose particular Spork was the best, or was invented first.  In practice how do their claims of suitability for use on their own as a Postcode, for Delivery Planning or as an Emergency Location Code stack up?

Postcode

They fail instantly as a possible Postcode due to their inability to ​facilitate manual sorting of post.  The first part of a postcode (in Eircode terminology the Routing Key) must be able to be used, on its own, to determine the principal post town that mail is routed through for delivery.  Delays in routing post to the correct post town impact delivery times.   Times of increased mail volumes, for example Christmas​, can coincide with coloured envelopes with handwritten addresses that cause difficulties for OCR systems and increase the requirement for manual sorting.  The Routing Key element of Eircode has been designed to suit current and future sorting requirements of An Post, and combined with the design of the unique identifier we would be extremely surprised if any existing Eircode needed to be changed within the next 100 years.

Delivery Planning

The promise is tempting, add a location code to a column in Excel and sort your records into efficiently grouped deliveries without having to lookup any other data.  In practice it fails miserably.  ​Take a random 100 addresses in an area and sort them by any of these codes and view the labelled results on a map; the problems are obvious.  Addresses that are close together but just happen to be either side of a major grid line will have very different codes, while those with more similar looking codes can be very far apart.  Then you have addresses that are either sides of rivers or mountains being grouped together because they have similar codes.  The exceptions are too numerous and the workarounds too awkward for this approach to work, in fact it increases inefficiency.  The starting point for any sensible grouping for delivery planning has to be areas that respect natural and man made geography, which is why we recommend Small Areas. Tagging this information from an Eircode or what3words lookup is trivial, and produces optimal results.

Emergency Location Code

You are in an unfamiliar area, you are calling Emergency Services and want to report your location.  ​Mobile phone geolocation is the problem.  In July 2016 Google launched Emergency Location Service in Android.  This feature, when supported by your network, sends location from your phone to emergency services when you dial an emergency number.  While we await the rollout of this service in Ireland and similar solutions from Apple, Emergency Services in Ireland are using the LocateMe112 system, designed by helicopter pilot Lt Colin Gallagher, that enables the GPS chip on an emergency caller's smartphone to be activated remotely – via a link sent via SMS – by rescue services, who can then pin-point the exact location of the injured person.  The key feature of LocateMe112 is that it doesn't require the installation of an app, only needing the caller to have a smartphone with location services turned on. 

When Emergency Location Services like Googles are available the information will be ​automatically communicated to Emergency Services.  I can think of no reason other than self-interest and reckless disregard for public safety to promote any alternative solution that requires someone during a call to Emergency Services to go to an app store, find an app, download the app, get a code and read it back to the operator.

Obviously this pertains to emergency response via a national control centre scenario. What about other scenarios like event medical services at a festival? What3words is the solution. Using words means non-technical people can accurately find any location and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system.

Conclusion

Spork inventors either realise the limitations of their invention and accept failure or invent grandiose conspiracy theories to explain why the world is being deprived of the benefit of their invention.  Our reply to those who claim an algorithm based hierarchical location code would have been a better design than Eircode as a National Postcode is simply "Have you ever actually tried to use a Spork?"