ThisPlace

Remember a location anywhere in the world with just four words.

Some interesting locations:

This app was inspired by http://what3words.com/

We started with using three words as well but found that it required obscure words, so we settled for four. See words, words, words for a discussion and how to use this with shorter or longer wordlists.

example

>>> import thisplace

# the home of particle physics
>>> CERN = (46.232355, 6.055419)

>>> four = thisplace.four_words(CERN)
>>> print four
'graham-ingram-sphere-rash'
>>> thisplace.decode(four)
(46.232335567474365, 6.055419445037842)

See where this is on ThisPlace map.

requirements

You need to install the geohash and bottle libraries:

$ pip install geohash
$ pip install bottle

words, words, words

There are a lot of 3x3m squares on the earth's surface.

By default we use four words to address every square. However this library also supports using three or six words. Below some reasoning why we made this choice.

To encode every square in only three words requires a long wordlist, as a result some fairly obscure words get on it. If you can live with having to remember more words the wordlist is much shorter and simpler.

The methods to encode latitude and longitude in a different number of words are sensibly named: three_words, four_words and six_words. All of them can be decoded by the decode method.

The six word wordlist comes from the amazing humanhash library. Words were chosen to maximise clarity in human communication, they should be more familiar than the words on the three wordlist:

>>> six = thisplace.six_words(CERN)
>>> print six
'spaghetti-carolina-kentucky-oscar-iowa-table'
>>> thisplace.decode(six)
(46.232335567474365, 6.055419445037842)

how it works

Each latitude/longitude pair is converted to a nine character geohash. This provides about 3meter resolution at all latitudes. The geohash is then converted to an integer which is encoded as a string of words.

The ThisPlace hashes share the property of a geohash that nearby locations have similar ThisPlace hashes:

>>> other_CERN_site = (46.256811, 6.056792)
>>> six = thisplace.six_words(other_CERN_site)
>>> print six
'spaghetti-carolina-kentucky-utah-seventeen-neptune'
>>> thisplace.decode(six)
(46.256797313690186, 6.056792736053467)
>>> print thisplace.six_words(CERN)
'spaghetti-carolina-kentucky-oscar-iowa-table'

The other CERN site is here on a map, it is indeed close to the main CERN site.

webservice

The file app.py provides a tiny webservice that allows to display a location given by three words on a Google Maps map.

The server requires bottle.py to be installed. It can be run locally by typing ./app.py or python app.py respectively.

brought to you by @betatim and @kdungs productions

Placeware / ThisPlace

readme