Human intelligible positioning

We use street addresses to refer to locations in a city. Street addresses are easy to remember and communicate because they follow a symbolic addressing scheme, containing human intelligible symbols. However, street addresses can often be ambiguous or confusing and don't provide complete coverage of outdoor spaces. Latitude and longitude coordinates, a metric addressing scheme, are unambiguous and accommodate locations that may not have street addresses. However, latitude and longitude coordinates are unusable on a daily basis because they must be specified to many digits to be useful at human-level scales. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a new hybrid addressing scheme, Human Intelligible Positioning (HIP), which uses a metric addressing scheme as its substrate. Addresses in this metric addressing scheme are mapped to two-dimensional offsets within named coordinate systems. HIP addresses combine the easy memorability and communicability of street addresses with the precision and universal outdoor coverage of latitude and longitude coordinates.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Venugopalan, Vishwanath, 1981-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert C. Miller.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/18008

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/18008