Human intelligible positioning

Abstract

We use street addresses to refer to locations in a city. Street addresses are easy to remember and communicate because they follow a symbolic addressing scheme, containing human intelligible symbols. However, street addresses can often be ambiguous or confusing and don't provide complete coverage of outdoor spaces. Latitude and longitude coordinates, a metric addressing scheme, are unambiguous and accommodate locations that may not have street addresses. However, latitude and longitude coordinates are unusable on a daily basis because they must be specified to many digits to be useful at human-level scales. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a new hybrid addressing scheme, Human Intelligible Positioning (HIP), which uses a metric addressing scheme as its substrate. Addresses in this metric addressing scheme are mapped to two-dimensional offsets within named coordinate systems. HIP addresses combine the easy memorability and communicability of street addresses with the precision and universal outdoor coverage of latitude and longitude coordinates.