>I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude but that never caught on," Mr Sheldrick said.
Well, if it's a life or death situation Mr Sheldrick, I'm pretty sure people would catch on fairly quick
I don't like the fact it's an opaque monopoly, but as a way to designate locations for human use, it's effective.
Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.
Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.
Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio, or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.
You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.
Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.
> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.
This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.
And when I said context, I didn't mean that they would understand what those three words point to, but rather they instantly can read those words having read them before. Long/Lat for most people isn't something they have ever used, so simple things like the "-1" might get missed. Admittedly the operator is likely to know that '1.080278' doesn't make sense given the country they are in and will automatically add the -, but it doesn't hurt to have options?
I believe it's just easier for the average person to communicate three words than two multi-digit-precision numbers.