Need directions? Why not ask an app?

To reduce the spate of failed deliveries in e-commerce space due to inability to locate an address, software development interns at Hotels.ng has created a referencing system for addresses that helps people find addresses in Nigeria.

In the absence of comprehensive address systems in Nigeria, landmarks and awkward descriptions are used to pinpoint places. That’s how phrases like “opposite the filling station” and “just after the junction” achieve notoriety in Nigeria’s lexicon.

Olayinka Success, developer at Hotels.ng and a group of interns sponsored by Hotels.ng began a project to define a new addressing format for locations across the country

Their idea is to uniquely identify places using a number of characters, for example NG-LA1600-OD-01. This string, when used to tag any location (for example a hotel), uniquely identifies it down to the exact building.

This is a scalable and flexible way to identify not just specific buildings, but can also be used to identify entire regions, e.g. the string NG-AK31UY would represent the entire region of Nigeria > Akwa Ibom State > Uyo > Uyo Urban.

“The product is still in its very early stages and it can only get better especially through collaborative efforts. We cannot possibly provide every address so we need people to contribute. People can actually suggest new addresses and flag those that might be wrong and need corrections.” says Olayinka Success.

Olayinka tells BusinessDay that the program why not an app behaves like one. It is hosted on the internet and typing http://locations.hng.tech/ in the url which will take the user to the site.

The developers say the Locations API has multiple potential benefits. It makes easy pinpointing of every location with a longitudinal and latitudinal address and corresponding driving instruction.

It also provides a global auto-complete address standard as the API recognizes similar addresses and can predict locations with accuracy. Places without postal codes have easily recognizable unique identification and all physical addresses can easily be linked to each other via their unique code, and driving instructions from any location to the next will be computed based on that.

Olayinka says the project is not commercialised for now. It is currently released in alpha as an open data project – the locations information is free and open to all to download, modify and fix. The hope is that with community effort, soon we will have an API that allows us to effortlessly identify locations without many problems.