A5 is a geospatial index that partitions the world into pentagonal cells. The cells are available at 31 resolution levels, from a handful covering the whole world down to less than 30mm²
https://github.com/felixpalmer/a5Open linkView original on lemdro.id
8 replies
Oh neat. I've been deep diving GPS and location encoding lately as I've been putting together a little geohash single-header lib in C.
This could be a cool addition.
How does their website have such a fancy hero animation but no picture of the pentagons??
The pictures seem to be in the examples page
Don't we have a bunch of these already, not least lat/lon rounded down to some precision? Why another?
I just want an easy-to-use, offline geocoder (mainly address to latlon but reverse would be cool too) that doesn't require terabytes of space, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and days to process. Handheld GPS units were doing this with only a few GB decades ago.
Why does this seemingly not exist as a FOSS project in $current_year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Google maps and OSMand support this standard.
I just use a lookup list with a few tenthousand cities. Cities don't move. Well, i also don't require exact position.
But thanks, this seems useful.
They actually do move... cities/towns/place names expand and contract, and incorporate and unincorporate all the time... it's a huge pain in the ass for our system at work. Some place names are also 100% made up by the USPS and only used by them, and guess what, you still gotta support it. Even the professional paid databases don't contain every possible place name people use.
And my comment was more about geocoding of exact addresses, not whole cities.