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SayWhere Geocoding System: Human-Memorable Geographic Coordinates
draft-saywhere-geocoding-01

Document Type Expired Internet-Draft (individual)
Expired & archived
Author Hugo O'Connor
Last updated 2026-04-22 (Latest revision 2025-10-19)
RFC stream (None)
Intended RFC status (None)
Formats
Stream Stream state (No stream defined)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
RFC Editor Note (None)
IESG IESG state Expired
Telechat date (None)
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This Internet-Draft is no longer active. A copy of the expired Internet-Draft is available in these formats:

Abstract

This document specifies SayWhere, an open-source system for encoding geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude, and optional altitude) into human-memorable word phrases and decoding them back to coordinates. The system provides deterministic, reversible encoding with two-layer error detection (per-word parity and optional terminal word-phrase checksum) and supports three-dimensional positioning for multi-level structures. SayWhere introduces hierarchical variable- length phrases with true prefix relationships, enabling precision scaling from regional (1 word) to meter-level accuracy (6 words). The system uses the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 (BIP-39) mnemonic wordlist for multilingual support and geohash spatial indexing for efficient location encoding.

Authors

Hugo O'Connor

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)