Suppose I wish to go to restaurant and find it is at (12.950015N, 77.576432E). I cannot easily enter it into an app I use for ordering a cab. Can we find a more user friendly form for this information?
Search engine listings for shops, business cards, gates of prominent buildings and bus stops should ideally display geocodes so that people could put them into their cell phone contacts and communicate chosen codes to cab companies. The challenge is to invent a notation that is easy to use by humans as well as by machines. Visit the following blog post for one proposal.
http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2016/04/city-location-codes-clcs.html
That type of geographic coordinate is the simplest that we possibly could invent. It requires 5 digits right of the point sign in order to get within about 1.1 meter of a location (~.5 m at higher latitudes). The 6 digits you show would get you to 11 cm, while 4 digits get you within about 111 m. We could write it in degrees-minutes-seconds using commas such as 12,59,01.034, but note that even in this form it takes 3 digits of precision in the last number (seconds) in order to get close to the location.
The problem is in the apps and the fact that everybody has their favorite geographic coordinate system. Some think that UTM should be the standard, and it generally is for GIS mapping people. However, UTMs require a person to know what Zone they are in and the U.S. lower 48 state area alone has 10 different UTM zones.
Already, there seem to exist an app that addresses your question in a way. It is called what3words. From the app's homepage, they describe it as "a global grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares. Each square has a 3 word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity. [The] geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses and vice-versa. Using words means non-technical people can accurately find any location and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links." Link - http://what3words.com/. I must state here that, I have no connection with the app so this is not some sort of promotion from me. I came across it and thought it might answer your question.
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