Ephemerality Concerns

[Cx]

Say for example I write down this Plus Code:

FWP9+J8

Strelley WA, Australia

And then later down the track.. Strelley doesn't

exist anymore, or that it is renamed.

The plus code becomes invalid, whereas a set of

coordinates will stay the same forever.

Am I missing something here? Cheers.

[Andreas B]

If "Strelley WA, Australia" ceases to exist and everyone forgets about its former existence in some location, then it will be impossible to retrieve the exact location, yes. It could still be narrowed down to either one of the several hundred "????FWP9+J8" locations in Australia, or even the ~120 of them in "WA, Australia", but probably not more than that.

I wonder how realistic that really is, though. What would need to happen so that everyone forgets about Strelley, but not about the way plus codes are generated. Generally speaking, any set of coordinates is only useful if people still know how to decipher them: Where is 0.0/x? Where is x/0.0? What's the actual difference between 0.0/x and 1.0/x?

[Cx]

Yea but what if I write it down in a book and nigga 50 years later its not a valid address... 

[MG]

Hello. 

I think it will continue to exist. and it will remain a valid place-name. 

I don't think pluscodes has reached the point where it tries to be dynamic and constantly update its self to confirm to real time changes in place names.
If it is written down in a book and you look it up again 50 years later it will still be able to locate it . 

Sure its not as ubiquitous as coordinates. That being said. Coordinates can be equally difficult to decipher when you don't know the coordinate system, and datum etc used to collect them. In many parts of the world there are localized coordinate systems used, which will differ and you need to know how to make transformations across a multitude of projections and circumstances.  

Also i don't see  this as a unique problem to plus-codes, it a geography problem that affects many data-sets and placenames. When boundaries get redistricted it just makes it difficult to compare a snapshot in time to a different snapshot in time after the redistricting has taken place especially when they are spatially significantly different and there is not enough granular data reconstitute those changes accurately.  As long as you are tracking the change to the data set you will be able to geographically  account for the spatial changes. And you'll know that that location that doesn't exist  in today data but it existed in the 1958 version of the data. 

Anyway. Your scenario would only be a problem if the pluscodes where in a constant state of change, then there would need to be away  to search earlier  iterations of plus codes. 

My two cents .

[Zongwei Li]

This is a bit of comparing apples to oranges. A plus code with a locality is meant to function like street addresses. If you write down a normal address (e.g. 123 Street) and the city gets renamed, you have the same problem of the address becoming invalid. If you rely on locality info and it changes, there's not much you can do about it.

If you want to guarantee that the location reference stays valid after 50 years, you'll want to use the global plus code (5PFWFWP9+J8 for your example address). This is a direct conversion from lat/long coordinates and doesn't rely on locality information.

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