Bug or Feature?

[Pascal Lola]

I am sure some of you are aware of this but why would 764Q+Q7 Louisville, Kentucky vs 764Q+Q7 Kentucky take me to completely different places? I am sure technically it's an intentional design, but that is a major user experience problem with highly critical consequences if this technology was to ever be adopted widely. Any thoughts on that?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

My guess is the center of Kentucky resolves to be in a different enough
place from Louisville such that the full OLC is different. One solution
to this is to either always give full codes (in this case either
86CP764Q+Q7 or 86CQ764Q+Q7 depending on what you are referring to) or
always include the nearest city.

We have a problem like this in Houston as it's spread out enough that
the 76X60000+ rectangle does not cover the entire city and codes near
the edges are potentially ambiguous. For example, the Flying J truck
stop near the 76X60000+/86260000+ boundary (30°N latitude I think) has a
code of X6XHXC+GV Harris County, Texas (or 76X6XHXC+GV).

I wouldn't necessarily call it a bug nor a feature, just a quirk of the
system and others like it.

--
Shawn K. Quinn <skq...@rushpost.com>
http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com

[Rasťo Šrámek]

Short code search works by finding the locality and then retrieving the closest plus code that matches the given suffix.

So "764Q+Q7 Louisville, Kentucky" reconstructs to 86CP764Q+Q7, while "764Q+Q7 Kentucky" to 86CQ764Q+Q7, because that is closer to the center of Kentucky.

A locality does not need to fit within a 1x1 degree XXXX0000+ rectangle to be a reference locality, the recovery is the closest code, rather than the code with the same

first 4 characters. However, if the locality gets close to 1 degree in spread, it cannot be used as it could be used as a reference locality to two different plus codes. Houston

in this case is a bit puzzling as it isn't really that large and is probably a result of poor geometry in the data. I think we'll fix that in our implementation..

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[Tariq]

Hi,

I may have missed or doing something dumb as I try to find the reason for shortened code "764Q+Q7"  against full code  86CP764Q+Q7 . Could any one please point me to online documents which explains the benefits of using shortened code.

Thanks for your help!

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[Rasťo Šrámek]

The short/compound codes are a direct replacement for street addresses. You can write:

<name>

WFMQ+H5

Praia

Cabo Verde

on an envelope and it will arrive, because your postal service knows where Cabo Verde is, and the Praia post in CV know how to deliver to plus codes.

A second benefit is that they are short and easier to remember (you already know the name of the town you live in).

http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com

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[Barry Hunter]

There is 

https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/olc_definition.adoc#shortening-open-location-codes

and

https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Guidance-for-shortening-codes

Not a big fan of shortened coded as such, as it does introduce ambiguity. And does make the code 'less portable'. The receive of the coder, has to be able to geocode the supplied 'Place' (which might be from a proprietary dataset like Google Maps - so even if do have a geocoder, it could decode differently and hence fail)