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Digitize the Entire EarthBy Xinhang Shen, President,
President NAC Geographic Products Inc. (October 23,
2002)
NAC Geographic Products Inc. has developed a
revolutionary technology to digitize our planet and make it
more convenient for all people living on it. The Natural Area
Coding System is a new geodetic system which introduces two
new features to the geodetic system: It integreates the
concepts of geodetic points, line sections, areas, and
three-dimensional regions and creates one standard form of
coordinates to represent all these geographic units; It
Employs 30 characters instead of ten digits and making full
use of these characters to produce shorter coordinates.
 As the world enters into the 21st century
information era, people are busy digitizing almost every
possible thing from music, books, maps, telephone to
television and delivering them through disk, CD, DVD, Internet
and wireless. Now what is the next big step for the
digitization? The answer is the most important object - the
earth we live on.
As the technology fast progresses,
people are now able to describe every corner of the earth
accurately. As the globalization continues, people need
accurate spatial information. That leads to the birth of the
Global Positioning System (GPS) that can provide exact
location information with small GPS receivers. Recently, GPS
chips have become so small that can fit into almost all
electronic devices such as watches, cameras, cellphones, so
cheap (below $10) that almost all people can afford. With this
technology break-through, digitizing the entire earth now
becomes non-fiction.
Now the problem is only how to
digitize the earth and make it really convenient for all
people living on it? Many people may think that this has
already been done because all GPS receivers can provide
accurate geographic coordinates for all locations in the
world. But after you examine the display of a GPS receiver,
you will realize the problem. When a pair of geographic
coordinates in longitude/latitude go to the resolution of
individual addresses, it will require more than 20 characters
that are nearly impossible for general consumers to remember,
and also difficult to communicate. It will make a business
card awkward to include such geographic coordinates. Due to
this weakness, printed street maps don't like to include
longitude/latitude coordinates, and therefore, GPS receivers
can't easily relate their readings with landmarks on the maps.
Because longitude/latitude coordinates are nearly useless to
general consumers, supposed small GPS watches still need a
large screen to show the current location on a map that makes
these watches larger, heavier and more expensive. Because
nobody likes using longitude/latitude to represent their
addresses, people still use long addresses for online driving
directions services that not only require many input keys but
also have difficulties when foreign characters are involved.
On the other hand, there are no systematic codes and
names for all the areas in the world. People still use place
names to retrieve maps from online map servers that are not
only inefficient but also have difficulties in inputting
foreign characters.
Therefore, no matter how accurate
locations GPS receivers can measure, the digitization of the
world has not been done yet. The digitization should make
everybody in the world able to use and benefit from it. This
will be one of the biggest steps for the world toward the
globalization and digitization in the 21st century.
NAC
Grid on a World Map
In order to solve these
problems, we have to study the current systems. At the moment,
a pair of geographic coordinates represent a point without
size that does not make any sense in the reality. Because of
the different concepts of points and areas, people have to use
different ways to represent areas and locations and make them
very inefficient. Actually everything in the world has a size,
why don't we use different size areas to represent locations
so that we only need one unified representation for both a
location and an area? Since the number of characters in
geographic coordinates are very sensitive to general
consumers, we should optimize them to make them as smaller as
possible. This study resulted in the birth of the Natural Area
Coding System (http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite)
that has generated Natural Area Codes (NACs) for all areas
from the size of thousand kilometers to one meter or even
smaller derived from longitude/latitude coordinates. These
eight or ten character NACs that can uniquely specify
individual buildings, houses, gates, doors, parking meters,
trees, sewage exits, etc everywhere in the world are also
called Universal Addresses.
The Natural Area Coding
System has really digitized the entire earth and made it
really convenient for all people living on it. These eight or
ten character Universal Addresses have the similar length of
telephone numbers. They can be easily remembered and
communicated. They have eliminated the barriers of languages
in addresses. They can easily fit into the limited space of
business cards, yellow page listings, advertisements, etc.
They can be pinpointed on all maps with Universal Map Grids no
matter they are world maps or local street maps. They can also
be displayed on all GPS receivers without support of databases
or maps. GPS watches displaying Universal Address can be made
much smaller, lighter and less expensive. Using Universal
Addresses to replace traditional addresses on online or
wireless driving directions services can save more than 80% of
input keys and eliminate the difficulties in inputting foreign
characters. Using Natural Area Codes instead of place names or
longitude/latitude coordinates to retrieve maps can save more
than 90% of input keys. The Universal Addresses can also be
used as global postal codes to sort all domestic and
international mail automatically. They can also make emergency
services more quickly and reliably, and save huge amount of
time for tourists and taxi drivers to find addresses.
This technology will create huge business
opportunities in upgrading all maps, watches, cellphones,
handheld GPS receivers, providing highly efficient online and
wireless driving directions services, map services, location
based business searching services, and developing GIS and
mapping software, emergency response systems, mail sorting
systems, property and public works management systems, etc.
All these will result in dozens of billion dollar businesses,
and may become a strong thrust to push the slaggish economy to
a healthy state.
Thus, this will be the next step of
digitization for the world.
GPS
Cellphone Displaying Spatial Coordinates as Longitude/Latitude
and Universal Address
Author:
Xinhang Shen,
President
NAC Geographic Products Inc.
http://www.nacgeo.com
(416) 496 6110
Related
Weblinks:
Article
in Globe & Mail
NAC
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