Thanks to a clever application of geocoding, search and rescue teams were able to locate a group of travelers lost in the Hamsterley Forest in England. Police are urging people to download the app, which they say has already saved many lives.

Only three words
Jess Tinsley and a group of her friends were on a five-mile journey in the middle of 2,000 hectares of Hamsterley Forest in Durham, UK, last week, when they realized they had strayed.

"We were in a field and we had no idea where we were," Tinsley told the BBC. "It was very horrible. I was joking and trying to laugh because I knew that if I didn't laugh I would cry."

Once they found a connection signal for emergency services, the emergency administrator asked them to download an application called "What3words". Within one minute of the download, the police had an accurate location for stranded hikers, and a rescue team was on its way to find them.

What are you doing three words?
The app essentially refers to a very specific location anywhere in the world, the app developers have divided the regions of the world into 57 trillion square meters can be located and found using the global positioning system.

Each square is three square meters, each with a three-word random address. For example, "dressing.flown.swim" should point to the midfield line at the Camp Nou in Barcelona, ​​while "Memories.photos" will take you to the meeting room at the Al Jazeera Media Institute at the Al Jazeera Media Network headquarters in Doha, Qatar. "Samaa.Listen.Colors" is the place of Zamzam water in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Replace inaccurate postal codes
Chris Sheldrick, founder of Wat 3 Words, got the idea of ​​the app after growing up in rural Britain and struggling with truck drivers who don't know where to go because of inaccurate postal codes.

"I tried to get people to use latitude and longitude, but that didn't happen," Shieldrick told the BBC. "It made me think how you can cut 16 numbers into something easier to use?"

As he spoke to a mathematician, Sheldrick found that there were enough sets of three words for each place in the world, and that 40,000 words were enough to cover the entire world.

Address revolution
In fact, the application of Wat 3 Words is not only used for emergency services, but Mongolia has replaced its entire postal code system with Wat 3 Words.

The country's harsh rural areas and poor postal infrastructure have made the application easier to use for many businesses.

But the app wants to go further and offers postal services to companies and possibly entire states.

However, the police say the tool's importance to them is to locate a specific emergency service, so they urge everyone to download the app.