Universal Address Enhanced Google Maps

NAC Geographic Products Inc. (Canada) has released NAC Enhanced Google Maps, an integration of the Natural Area Coding System with Google Maps, through the Google Maps API. With the NAC Enhanced Google Maps, a Universal Address based location signature for all news reports now has become feasible, widely available and extremely useful.

As something happens, the first response of most people is to ask when and where which are the most important information for any event. With the NAC Enhanced Google Maps, journalists can obtain the Universal Address of the exact location of any event happening in the world, and readers can use the Universal Address based location signature to directly get the local detail map without any zooming and panning.

As newspapers that do not have the capability to embed hyperlinks and a randomly given location shown on Google Maps as referred by an online story is not orally communicatable due to the lack of the efficient description of accurate locations. With NAC Enhanced Google Maps users can directly get the detail local map of any location and area in the world with few characters of a NAC. For example, if a newspaper inserts NAC: TQ PS into its news related to North Korea's nuclear test, readers need typing in only four characters on the NAC Enhanced Google Maps to get the map of the exact location without zooming and panning.

A NAC can represent any area or location in the world. A two-character NAC represents an area about 1000km X 700km (like a province), a four-character NAC represents an area about 33km X 23km (like a city), a six-character NAC roughly represents every square kilometer area, an eight-character NAC represents an area about 35m X 25m (like a building), and a ten-character NAC approximately represents every square meter on the earth surface. Since an eight-character or a ten-character NAC has reached the resolution of a traditional address, it is also called a Universal Address, for example, NAC: 8KD7 PGGM (the Universal Address of White House). Using a Universal Address (i.e. an eight or ten character NAC) instead of a street address to specify a location on any location based service can reduce 80% of key input, avoid difficulty in inputting addresses with foreign characters and eliminate the vast errors from address databases (outdated matches, no matches, duplicated matches, wrong matches, etc). While street addresses can only specify less than 1% of the locations on the earth surface, Universal Addresses can specify 100% without any missing locations.

Example of a location signature link for a web page: