The Universal Address System Gets Adopted in China


Written by NAC Geographic Products Inc
Tuesday, 17 January 2006Beijing, China, PDAger Mobility Inc. (www.PDAger.com) and NAC Geographic Products Inc. (www.nacgeo.com) announced that the two companies have reached an agreement that NAC Geographic Products Inc. license the Natural Area Coding System (http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/) to PDAger Mobility Inc. for its wireless location service application – Map4U.


The Natural Area Coding System is a new geodetic system that uses simple codes called Natural Area Codes (NAC) to unify all geographic coordinates, area codes, addresses, postal codes, map grids, map sheet codes and property identifiers in the world. A two character NAC can uniquely represent an area about 1200km by 750km anywhere in the world; a four character NAC can represent a 40km by 25km area in the world; a six character NAC can specify every square kilometer on the earth surface; an eight character NAC can uniquely represent every area about 30m by 25 m in the world; and a ten character NAC can represent every square meter on the earth surface. Usually, any city in the world can be represented by a four character NAC such as NAC: 8C Q8 representing Toronto, NAC: T0 N1 representing Hangzhou, and NAC: T3 N6 representing Shanghai. A six character NAC can be used to specify any street block or small town in the world. An eight character NAC can be used to represent a building or a house. A ten character NAC can be used to specify roadside small objects such as a fire hydrant, an electric wire pole, a street light, a sewage exit, etc. Since an eight or ten character NAC has reached the resolution of street addresses, they are also called Universal Addresses. With Universal Addresses, people can conveniently specify any locations no matter they are temporary camping sites, fishing spots, or permanent store locations.
Specifying locations on location based services, especially mobile location based services is a big problem because (i) addresses are always very long and time consuming to input, (ii) addresses are language/character dependent and difficult to input, (iii) addresses are full of variations and difficult for software to parse successfully and (iv) addresses do not exist in more than 99% locations in the world that can’t be specified by street addresses and make street address based location services completely fail. All these problems are solved by the introduction of Universal Addresses which are short (only 8 or 10 characters), language independent (only internationally recognized alphanumeric characters), written in one standard without variations, and exist at all locations in the world without any missing spots. Universal Addresses can be easily included on business cards, yellow page listings, business directories and advertisements. They can be neatly put on photographs under the date to indicate exactly when and where a picture is taken. They can make people answer the question “Where are you?” accurately and easily. They can significantly improve all emergency services no matter in communicating accurate emergency locations or in specifying locations of fire hydrants and other water sources. They can even be used as Global Postal Codes for automatic mail sorting.
The Natural Area Coding System has been widely adopted in the world (as shown on http://www.nacgeo.com/media.asp). Now there have already been 24 countries in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Pacific Region digitized with Universal Addresses. There are many Universal Addresses enhanced commercial wireless location based services available in all industrialized countries, such as Locamagic (http://locamagic.biz/help/) and Mobile Location Based Services Network (http://mlbs.net/demo/).
“Location based services are not growing as fast as expected in China. One of the major reasons is that the complexity, variations and incompleteness of traditional addresses plus the difficulty of inputting Chinese characters make the method based on traditional addresses to specify locations inefficient and unreliable,” said Mr. Savio Chu, Chairman of the board of PDAger Mobility Inc., “the Universal Address System seems the right solution to solve all these problems. We are glad that PDAger has become the first company in China to adopt the Universal Address System. The high efficiency and high reliability brought by the Universal Address System will surely further improve the satisfaction of Map4U’s users in accessing its location based services.”
“This agreement represents a historical step for the Universal Address System to be widely adopted in China,” added by Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc., “this is because PDAger is the leader in wireless location based services in China, and Map4U providing self-positioning, POI search, map browse and routing services is the most popular wireless LBS application in China.”
NAC Geographic Products Inc. will also work closely with Chinese governments and other corporations to digitize Beijing with the Universal Address System before the 2008 Olympic Games by marking all street signs and house number plates with local Universal Addresses, listing all businesses with their Universal Addresses on yellow pages, tourist brochures and websites, publishing street maps overlaid with the Universal Map Grids, and providing comprehensive location based services enhanced with Universal Addresses so that Beijing will be able to welcome all its guests for the Olympic Games with extraordinary convenience and efficiency for traveling in this ancient and modern city no matter whether they know Chinese or not.
About PDAger Mobility Inc.Established in 2001 in Beijing, China, PDAger Mobility Inc. has rich experience in the development of wireless GPS / GIS / LBS applications accumulated since 1993, and is specialized in wireless data service, with focus on LBS as Chinese key service provider and master content integrator, granted as “Hi-Tech Company” by Beijing Municipal Government and as a licensed “Nationwide Telecom Value Added Service Provider” by the Ministry of Information Industry of China.
Web: www.pdager.com
About NAC Geographic Products Inc. Incorporated in 1995 in Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. is a world’s leading company in geographic information technologies. In addition to the Natural Area Coding System, the company has developed many important software products: WEBGIS, NACMAP, NACDRAW, etc. It also provides real-time geocoding, reverse-geocoding, mapping, driving directions, nearby business searching and traffic information services of 30 countries for web applications.
Web: www.nacgeo.com

Number of comments (0) - Add your comments to this article...
You are not authorized to leave comments - please login