Zopto Address Scheme
ZoomIn, an on-line street maps for New Zealand, has developed a really neat URL scheme for locations, called Zopto.
The idea is that naming a location by Lat/Lon is not really human readable, easily indexable, or understandable. Instead, locations should have a good URL friendly schema for accessing sites, posting to blogs, people easily getting to data on a site, etc.
So, for example, to find information for Michigan I would do:
/us/mi/wayne/northville/-highearthorbit+office
or for the Whitehouse perhaps:
/us/dc/Pennsylvania+Ave/1600/-White+House/-Oval+Office
As brought up in the discussion at Where2.0, there were some concerns regarding splits across municipalities (Lake Superior is in both the US and Canada), and countries like Japan which doesn’t use street addresses.
I like the push to human-readable, but semantically useful, data references and metadata.
My name is
June 17th, 2006 at 5:48 am (#)
Thing is, tests show that URL’s aren’t used to navigate really by ‘normal’ people; heck even I don’t.
June 17th, 2006 at 5:49 am (#)
(of course it’s still good to have an URL which doesn’t scare the pants off someone)