In my previous post I argued that we have a problem with addresses. Michale McIntyre puts the same argument in a much more entertaining way.
The Police in the UK are fully aware of the problem explained by Michael McIntyre and have proposed to people the use What 3 Words. when people need their assistance. While I salut this initiative of the Police to help find places. It might be a more useful system to use than Open Location Code (OLC) which I argued for in my previous posts.
I still think OLC is a better system for building an addressing system. However, in an emergency situation saying three words down the telephone is easier than saying a string of letters and numbers. Horses for courses as the British say. However, Google maps is on every phone nearly while W3W is not. So it may be more productive for the police and emergency services to promote the use of OLC.
What do you think is the better system for emergency use considering the arguments above?
In the next post I will talk about other problems the use of OLC may create if used as an addressing system.
Governments in developing countries do not have the ability to register students/voters/patients accurately for lack of consistent addresses, the same goes for other government and commercial organisations. The lack of backbone information infrastructure is rooted in a lack of maps and addresses which hampers planning and evidence-based decision making. Natural disasters are a prime example of this lack of basic planning tools. Open Street mapping and https://mapaction.org are responses to the need for mapping information management as soon as disaster strikes. QZ Africa chronicles how Poor data hurts African countries’ ability to make good policy decisions.
The traditional way for mapping as prescribed by the ISO Standard and the recommendation of the World Bank for Street Addressing and the Management of Cities will mean an address naming project for a country which will take over 10 years at a huge cost; regardless of mitigating actions and devolved authority to local action. The emirates of Abu Dhabi launched an addressing initiative in 2012 to finish in 2014 https://onwani.abudhabi.ae with traditional addressing approach and QR codes attached. Onwani in the webaddress simply means my address in Arabic. In 2019 the Emirates municipalities are still allocating funds to finish the work, naming roads and putting up signes and numbers. An app was created to facilitate the use of this system “Onwani click” in your nearest app store. Ministries hold workshops for logistical firms to introduce them to the addressing system. This is in an emirate that is less than 3 million people and $130,000 GDP per person. Imagine doing this in Nigeria.
The biggest drawback of this approach is the lack of utility in the intervening years and the diminishing rate of return on investment.
The process of naming every street and issuing a numbering system for each street will take a very long time and cost a lot of money without providing immediate relief or utility. A significant drawback to this approach is the lag time between areas with named streets and numbers which are prone to mistakes, going out of date quickly, and suffer from ambiguity that all traditional addressing suffers from. For example;
A post code, PE33 9QL in rural Cambridgeshire provides no help to a postman or to delivery services. While a six characters ‘HG66+H7,’ King’s Lynn is specific to 13 meters for a building at the end of dirt track. The actual location of a building, with this address ‘School Ln, end of River Drove, Stoke Ferry, King’s Lynn PE33 9QL,’ is 500 meters away from the postcode center as the crow flies and 1700m along the road. This is in Britain who has been mapping and addressing for over 200 years, what chance developing countries have?
I grew up in a country where there are some street names, and in some cases numbers, but nobody uses them. The simple reason for this is the time lag between new roads and buildings made and the official naming and numbering happening simultaneously. This demonstrates another example of the lack of a solution with traditional addressing.
So, what are the properties we need in an address, derived from the lessons learnt in the above examples:
Utility: Address can be used as a unique identifier for a building or a place, now. Allowing organisations to consistently attach information to that place, for example, voters, patients, students, utility bills, shipping address and so on.
Easily Discoverable: The last thing you need is to spend €27m in a small country like Ireland to let people know what their postcode is!
A local app is not necessary to find addresses in your locality.
Machine readable when hand written on an envelop.
Just after I finished writing this article I became aware of a company which is trying to create addressing within their own city in Libya https://misrata.onwan.ly. It provides a local system that will work for them for lack of a universally adopted system. This is akin to the addressing System of Abu Dhabi reliant on a number, local mapping application and a QR code. QR code can not be had written.
Open Location Code have the characteristics of a global easy to adopt system which we need to start building a different kind of world. As the pandemic “has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built”. UN Secretary General Guterres. We cannot afford not to do so.
I discover now that the Open Street Maps community proposed the adoption of OLC January 2019. A step in the right direction if implemented and an example to other mapping oranisations.
The geo industry has shaped the world and the way people go about their lives. This has been clear to people in the industry even before Google saw the potential of using location in their advertising and unleashing Maps into the world. Geo-spatial data forms the backbone of the digital economy. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) is fundamental for shaping decision making processes, for government, business and society.
A call to mission.
How do I propose that the Geo-industry can change the world? Again. We are very aware of worldwide changes to the way people use information. However, the experience of those in the Global North Is very much different to users of location services in the Global South. This can be seen from finding places, navigation and the availability of up to date maps for the basic running of government and commerce. The Geo-industry did not create the disparity between the North and the South, if anything their efforts have created opportunities in the South that were previously unimaginable. Having said that, we have the capability and the capacity to improve the situation in the south.
The Global South is beset with problem that the Geo-Industry can help alleviate. These problems are developmental, political, and societal, and are exacerbated by a lack of information that would at least help shape and develop the debate for change. David Pilling’s (FT Africa Editor) opinion article in the Financial Times articulated the reasons African countries are missing the data needed to drive development citing several African Leaders decrying this state. The UNGGIM 2030 Sustainable Development Goal looked un-achievable in December 2019; however, if we now take into consideration past approach and ‘Business as Usual’, it looks like this goal is in fact a fantasy. We are now aware that we cannot continue this trend and some change is essential to alter the trajectory of humanity.
Yes we can!
So what help the Geo-Industry can provide the South in aid of sustainable development? The importance of a well-developed Spatial Data Infrastructure is acknowledged as a backbone of information organisation and as an essential digital infrastructure. As we know the more advanced a country is the more complex their SDI is. This usually manifest in existence of various agencies providing multiple components. Coupled with sophisticated governance arrangements. Admittedly these complex SDI’s allow many of us to make our living by navigating, decoding and trying to make compatible with each other, within one country or across borders.
Although we have a plethora of information that we can collect from space, and access to data is cheap, the South still lacks the basics of mapping that we all are so accustomed to. Facebook has shown that we can create the necessary data for a continent, Africa, at scale. Microsoft released 18M building footprints in Uganda and Tanzania to enable AI Assisted Mapping. Google have also done work, enriching their maps with outlines of buildings. However, this was done using machine learning which means results vary between places and creates inconsistencies. Yet these examples of available data are not in a state that allows the south to have a workable SDI in the modern sense.
What is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
So what is an MVP that would allow developing countries to be able to organise data on a national level in a meaningful way? This question has been answered by work done by the UN. Various UN bodies have adopted the concept of Land Administration for geospatial data as a bedrock. It is well ingrained in the various international bodies and agencies from the World Bank to Europe wide agencies. To understand how much Land Administration is referenced, searching in Google on land administration produces 757million results, that is 3 times as many as for Tesla results and about 43% of Chocolate results! (OK every time I do the search slight differences occur, but ratios consistent) Imagine something like Land Administration is half as popular as Chocolate.
The long struggle in creating Land Administration solution have led to the creation of A Fit for Purpose methodology for developing nations by UNDP, the World Bank and Netherland Kadaster. A basic outline of this approach is the use high resolution satellite images, aerial photography or drones to digitise buildings and land parcels following a set protocol that aims at continuous improvement in the quality of the data.
To this end the World Bank have supported several countries by arranging credit and supporting national initiatives to implement Land Administration. Obviously, the geospatial element is only a part of such an approach, legal administrative educational and capacity building are other notable components. However, mapping is a central component as without it there is no Land Administration as envisaged by the UN and others. But first let us review a case of Land Administration application and see how things developed …..
Ghana A tale of Woe!
The World Bank provided $50m Dollars of investment, $5m Local and $50m from 2011 to 2016 for phase 2 of the Land Administration programme. Phase 1 started in 2003. An additional $35m in 2018 has been allocated for stage 3 of this initiative . Yet after spending all these millions and all this time only 10% of Ghana has been reported as mapped in the last decade. There is no evidence of this mapping outside of articles in the news. Even the website of the Land Administration agency in Ghana that took over 6 years to report the 10% mapping and get a face lift in preparation of another injection from the World Bank, and after spending $55M, and now with another $35m, is not working now. (Accessed on 25th of May 2020 23:40 and 14 June 2020 15:18.)
Why am I picking on Ghana! Other than some familial ties to the country and having a contact who asked me to develop an addressing proposal to take to the President. As with many of these things the proposal fizzled out but now I am paying attention to the country and following developments, there.
What went Wrong in Ghana?
After nearly 10 years Ghana has only managed to map 10% of the land and failed at providing addressing for the mapped area. This failure is multifaceted: political, governance, managerial and technical. The glaring technical shortcomings which may provide some explanation for this breakdown in delivery are:
Failure to invest in the right technology.
Failure to focus on functionality and utility so that benefits can be immediately realised within the first year of operations.
Failure to adopt an addressing system that is effective and simple to use.
The last point above, the failure of adopting an addressing system, is unfortunately a universal failure rather than specific to Ghana.
The problem with Addresses
Ghana has been trying to develop an Addressing system for couple of decades now with little success. Ireland the last OECD country to introduce postal codes, at a cost of €27 million, in 2014 still does not have house numbers in many villages and rural locations despite having road names. Ireland is around a quarter of the size of the surface area of Ghana, and a fifth of the population size, yet has still have not managed to create street numbers across Ireland 5 years later. Notably, the €27 million did not create mapping or full addressing, just postcodes and the campaign to let the population know their postcodes. These two examples expose the weakness of adopting a traditional approach to address creation. Therefore, we cannot really blame developing countries for the failure to advance this point.
Is there a point to mapping without an addressing system!
A lack of an addressing system cannot be used as an excuse for a lack of change. What3three words came up with a solution that was exciting and fun for a while and we have to give kudos for their brilliant promotion to the public, some governments and even in TV programmes. However, what3words is not very practical and is problematic across languages and for automation, especially mail sorting machines. What is needed is a system that immediately allows users to make use of addressing, that provides the same functionalities of a traditional system, in providing unique addresses to buildings and land Parcels, allows Navigation, geocoding so way finding is immediate and is available Universally to all users at a very affordable, or negligible cost.
Say hello to https://plus.codes AKA Open Location Code (OLC). This may be one of the greatest of Google’s creations and is open to all to use, developed in Goggle’s Zurich Engineering office and released October 2014. Yet six years later I am sure Geo-technology people reading this will be surprised to know that it exists. The most important aspect of OLC is its ability to function as a postcode and as a location in very limited number of letters and numbers across the world e.g. 7VJ7+QH, Singapore. To see an example of the great capabilities of this technology see the plus code website and Addressing the Unaddressed.
So now we have an MVP.
Now the MVP is a combination of Land Administration Buildings, Land Parcels mapped to Fit for Purpose level, and Open Location Code. I think this should have been called Open Location Addressing, attached to the buildings and Land Parcels. This is not going to be the ultimate solution, it will have problems and those need solving, the good news is, they are solvable. Creating the MVP will allow all kinds of things to happen, from voter registration, even in slum cities, to better education and health management. It will allow governments to attach population statistics to locations accurately and allow better targeting of investment and support to communities from both the private and public sectors.
So how can we create this MVP?
I spoke earlier about the ability of Facebook, Microsoft and Google to create various products using their AI platforms. This is one way of doing it. How good are the AIs in creating the MVP? My suspicion is that we are still early in getting high accuracy rates, above 90% and we need that kind of accuracy for this to be accepted as a viable solution. This may be a couple or more years down the line. There will be a need to have human intervention on a massive scale. The Open Street Map have shown that this can be done. However, what would be unprecedented is having the big Geo-players team up with grass roots movements like OSM; for the betterment of humanity, we are in territory that needs this kind of intervention. The UNGGIM Future Trends report on International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) need for crowdsourcing and volunteered Geo-information for developing nations. I am sure good will is available on all sides to allow us to do this.
Who Needs to do What?
The first thing that is needed is for Online Mapping giants, like Bing Maps, Here, Apple and the others like Open Street Maps and Mapbox to start using OLC as a searchable and findable asset. Using OLC by the whole industry will put this solution at the centre of addressing, the easiest decision to make, if we put rivalry aside. It is a negligible cost to mapping services but it provides a huge boost for addressing. If you want an incentive for using OLC here is one, the reduction of people being lost while using your navigation system with OLC will provide you with immediate carbon reduction benefits. This will be an effective measure for both the North and the South. Failures in deliveries to rural addresses is rife in the North. The second part of the solution is the difficult part, who is going to do what in the Land Administration mapping domain? It can be done in one of the following two ways:
A true collaborative open solution: where the geo-industry comes together and split the work. This would improve their AIs with the help of the wider community. The Big Players, or even one can decide to do this, engage OSM and others within a country to help improve the AI outputs or even start providing the input data. Outputs use, benefits, costs for use and added products and service etc. can be sorted out as part of the collaborative approach through a foundation or by adapting an OSM approach.
A commercial venture: In this approach a venture fund or a big Mapping company can decide to create this MVP and use its knowhow to create a compelling product that they can sell to governments and agencies within the developing world. I have done the maths, investigated the monetisation of mapping and addressing in developing countries. Even without access to the World Bank for funding to create this ready-made solution a venture can make money from this solution.
It is not important which solution finds its way to create this seismic and quantum shift in mapping for the developing countries. As long as we can do it and create a better world.
If we build it will they come?
This is always a question that we must contemplate. I am convinced that this combination of the best addressing solution around with the Land Administration fit for purpose approach. Each of these solutions are validated separately as a solution combining the two creates a compelling offer. The adoption of this solution to underpin the spatial data infrastructures in developing countries will still require a campaign and developing protocols to help adoption and benefits extraction. Cape Verde is now adopting OLC as an addressing system and the adoption of OLC in Calcutta as in Addressing the Unaddressed mentioned above, are encouraging signs of wider adoption.
The provision of a unique identifier for buildings in developing countries has profound, organisational, social and commercial consequences. The ability to attach information reliably and consistently to a single location creates numerous opportunities for, organising, planning and creating efficiency yields.
Last thoughts.
Even with this long article I am afraid I had to be superficial with details and problems that require solving for this solution to happen. However, it is necessary to articulate a first version of this proposal so that it finds roots and can be nourished to bear fruits.
If you have lasted and read this whole article I salute you. Please help make this happen through sharing with others and through providing critical positive feedback and sharing with me and the community ways we can make bring sustainable development to the South through the creation of Minimum Viable SDIs for the good of all of humanity.
Addressing systems are essential for the management of modern economies and the assurance of data collection to base economic investment on intelligence gained from data. Traditional addressing systems, assigning addresses through the use of a number road name, district city and administrative area, have been employed for the last couple of hundred years. However these old systems are have several disadvantages with lack of complete coverage even in places like and importantly take decades to implement and often are never completed.
We propose a novel addressing system by combining state of the art technologies. This Intelligent Addressing and Mapping (IAM) approach assigns unique digital identifier to each building and land parcel. The IAM system is compatible with some and all modern mapping systems, such as car satellite navigation, and behaves as an address and as a postcode at the same time. The IAM system adheres to the UNDP and World Bank proposed standards for a practical Land Administration. IAM while modern and futuristic through the provision of unique identifiers also allows the basis of traditional addressing to take shape and develop.
By using IAM unique digital identifiers will allow citizens and the State to find their addresses online or through the use of an app on their smart phone. A digital map of buildings and land parcels will allow the State to organise their resources for Land Administration, economic growth and development as a well as for security.
This presents a futuristic strategy to secure the benefits of addressing, in a relative short period of time, generating unique addresses, way finding, and navigation, while at the same time creating data for Land Administration in advance of the UN 2030 target date for sustainable development. Setting up the digital infrastructure of Nigeria will provide the right conditions for investment and sustainable development of the economy and place developing countries who adopt the system at the forefront of all developing countries and on a par with European countries. Our approach can deliver a digital addressing system with a rapid streamlined implementation within 5 years.
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