A 3D open location encoding system has been released by Geocode.xyz

Geocoding is becoming increasingly important for a number of emerging technologies, from autonomous car navigation to drone delivery systems. In response, a number of 2D geo-encoding standards have been developed.

Today we are extending our 2D location encoding system, GeoCode, which we released about a year ago, to support elevation up/down to 17576 meters. This is the first open location encoding standard for pinpointing an exact location in three dimensions.

You may find your own 3D geocode by entering your x,y,z at https://3geonames.org/latitude,longitude,elevation or by downloading and installing the software in your own system.

Geolocation expressed as (latitude, longitude, elevation) can be converted offline into a geocode, and vice versa using a data structure embedded in the software without the need of a database.

Geocodes preserve location context in their triple name format, with the first name being the most prominent geo-name in relative proximity. GeoCode avoids borderline discontinuities via a smooth space-filling function technique - hence nearby locations will have similar GeoCodes. In the triple name format, such locations will share the first 2 names. For example, https://3geonames.org/RIGA-FRIDAY-TODAY (56.937030, 24.088460, 0) is the location of the conference where I delivered a talk announcing this system a few days ago. Another nearby location is RIGA-FRIDAY-TOASTER -> (56.937030, 24.088460, 17)

Pricing and Availability

This system is free to use and modify, however, we retain full commercial rights.

About GeoCode.xyz

At Geocode.xyz we provide innovative geocoding and geoparsing solutions for location information. We invented the 3geoname system as a way to speed up our reverse geocoding engine, which is now the first 3d reverse geocoding engine. Today we are releasing it as open-source seeing as it also fills a need as a location encoding system.

For more information, please visit https://3geonames.org/riga.html, https://3geonames.org/ or https://geocode.xyz