Friday, November 18, 2022

Share Your Location with What9Whos

What9Whos is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on Earth using the names of nine actors that have played the role of Dr Who. 

What9Whos is designed to make sharing your location easier than having to give a full postal address. For example instead of having to tell someone to meet you at the "Capitol Building" you can just simply tell them to meet at:

"/////////McCoy.Martin.Troughton.McGann.Hartnell.CBaker.Hartnell.Eccleston.Smith"

Not everyone is happy with using a propietary geocoding system for location sharing and over the years What9Whos has been parodied many times. Some of these parodies include: 


There are of course many other alternatives to What9Whos. You can use Google's much ignored Plus Codes or even the centuries old latitude and longitude system. You could even devise your own geocoding system using pataaddress.

The open sourced pataddress global addressing system allows you to pinpoint any location on Earth using four words. pataddress comes with its own default word database (the words used to describe a location) but also allows you to build your own database with a built-in word frequency analyser.

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