Ben Nolan from Projectx Technology showed off their unique and simple Zopto location addressing scheme to a very favorable response here at the Where 2.0 conference. Projectx is based in New Zealand and started out building community mapping sites for New Zealand and Australia, as the big map players were not yet indexing these countries and this resulted in them building their entire system from the ground up, including the geographic addressing scheme. Based on the same type of addressing that has been commonly used on the web and incorporating aspects of the world’s postal systems, Zopto’s format uses URLs that include the common words for the location information of a physical address being cited. For example, the Zopto URL for the Fairmont Hotel here in San Jose would look like:
/ca/santa+clara/san_jose/market+street/170/
There’s lots of advantages to a format like this including that it supports unique addresses, it’s human readable, self-descriptive, and easily indexable. As conference co-chair Nat Torkington pointed out, there is a lot of power in making use of the fundamental properties of the web as Zopto has done to create a basis for deriving and connecting geographic locations on the web.
