! Just why postcodes are not a good universal choice for giving locations. They were designed by the Post Office for its purposes (and nobody else's), and are only widely used because they are widely known.I recall an amusing incident in my local walking club where somebody used an app to find nearest postcode to a car park for those with sat navs. The car park in question was on an open moorland section of road with no buildings anywhere near by on the Oldham Holmfirth road. What this application did was pick up the postcode of a remote farmhouse that was only accessible by dirt track road from Marsden and the only way though was a mountain footpath or a very long drive around.
For getting help in emergency, to my mind AML is the thing to go for - where the phone sends its location, without caller involvement - or something like SARLOC (which sends a text to phone, triggering a web app to do the same).
There are lots of apps that the user could have on their phone to give their location, pretty well all of which will do the job as long as emergency control can handle them, but they all require caller action, and have one sort of disadvantage or another. (See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1XqCKE7GjIIdACvNo-FJzSF0CatAO3WX5PJa_9nnLTqE/pubhtml for an incomplete list...)
And if they don't have a smart phone with GPS, then they're back to reading maps and signs, and looking round to describe their location...
Following najaB's comment, the big problem with w3w is that is only usable via their services (without them, it's just a load of meaningless words); and they are out to make money, which they do by charging for service to decode whichever.three.words back into something more meaningful (and aggressively defending their intellectual property to stop you doing it yourself).
[Edited to add quote at end]Alternative addressing systems have attempted to increase human memorability, verifiability and machine readability. Notable examples are What3words and Open Location Code. However, attempts to create a broadly accepted standard around them have failed to materialize as these systems are either proprietary, like Google, and/or open source projects lacking economic incentives. What3Words uses unique three-word addresses to divide the world into a grid of 3✕3 m2 squares. In its system, an address such as Banana.Radio.Scent could describe an area within a field for example. Though What3Words may hope to become a global standard, it is still a centralized addressing system that charges a license fee. (From https://foam.space/publicAssets/FOAM_Whitepaper_May2018.pdf )
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