Government moving forward on geocodes says lawmaker
Transport sector lawmaker Frankie Yick says he thinks the government is moving forward on an open-access official geocode system for Hong Kong, that will allow people and companies to pin-point locations in a machine-readable way.  Yick is part of a task force to promote the use of geocodes, which contain the coordinates of street addresses or geographic locations. The six legislators say geocodes can help with urban planning, infrastructure development, market research and resource allocation.  "Our government has already developed something for internal use," Yick said. "So the meeting we had with the deputy financial secretary, Mr Michael Wong, was very positive. They have already assigned the Development Bureau to take the lead on this project and that will be included in the recommendation list of the sub-group on digital infrastructure under the Financial Secretary's digital economy development committee." Yick says using numbers is more user-friendly than addresses and having a digital infrastructure means applications can be built on top of it. He says this will improve things like last mile delivery for e-commerce, or fire engines finding the exact location of a fire. Geocodes are already in use in widely-available apps but Yick is calling for an official Hong Kong version, similar to the six-digit post codes in Singapore. He says it should just be a matter of converting the government's internal system and then making it public.