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Problems and Solutions; Wireless Location Based
ServicesBy Xinhang Shen, President, President NAC
Geographic Products Inc. (January 2003)
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Friendly Version
Current wireless location
based services are growing much slower than expected. One of
the major problems is the inefficiency of geographic
coordinates such as longitude/latitude and UTM. These
coordinates require more than 20 characters at a resolution of
meters that are difficult for people to remember and
communicate. They are also difficult to be displayed on and
input into small wireless devices. All these make geographic
coordinates nearly useless to general consumers.
(Published by
WirelessDevNet.com, Jan. 22, 2003) -- Consumers remain using
traditional addresses and place names to access location based
services. These addresses and place names are long character
strings that require many keys to input, and sometimes, they
include special or foreign characters that can’t be directly
input on a cellphone key pad. The wide variations of address
formats also make it impossible to develop reliable algorithms
to handle all addresses, which lead to frequent failures in
handling addresses. The inconvenience and failures have
significantly reduced the attractiveness of wireless location
based services.
All
these problems can be solved by the Natural Area Coding
System. This article proposed five wireless location based
services enhanced with the Natural Area Coding System:
- Universal Address lookup service
- GPS enhanced cellphone
- Wireless driving directions service
- Wireless map service
- Wireless location based search service
Enhanced with the Natural Area Coding System,
users need to input only eight characters (Universal Address)
instead of a more than forty character traditional address to
specify any location on the earth, and four characters
(Natural Area Code) instead of country, province and city
names to specify any area in the world. Moreover, Universal
Addresses and Natural Area Codes are in alphanumeric
characters, they can be input on all cellphones to eliminate
the difficulty of inputting addresses and place names with
special or foreign characters. Universal Addresses are
available everywhere on the earth surface that allows people
to access location based services even for temporary camping
sites where there are no addresses at all. Similarly, Natural
Area Codes can help people to specify any areas in the world
for wireless location based services, no matter where they are
and whether they have names or not.
More than 80%
saving of input keys and language independence brought by the
Natural Area Coding System will significantly improve all
wireless location based services in efficiency, reliability
and completion.
However, this technology has two
barriers to overcome before it liberates great power. The
first barrier is vast public awareness. If people don’t know
the technology and its advantages, they will not use any
features brought by the technology, and all these services
will not have any advantages because of the introduction of
the technology. The second barrier is wide availability of
Universal Addresses. If people don’t know their Universal
Addresses, they still can’t benefit from the advantages of the
technology either.
To overcome these two barriers, it
requires great influence and comprehensive services that most
small or medium size companies are not able to accomplish.
Therefore, only large companies with large influence in the
society and providing mass communication services can achieve
the goal. An ideal candidate is a large telecommunication
company which provides both wireless location based services
and telephone catalogs for fixed phones.
Telephone
companies in North America have already had longitude/latitude
coordinates for every fixed telephone that are provided to
emergency services in 911 calls. It will be a small work for
these companies to list Universal Addresses together with
fixed telephone numbers and addresses on all telephone
catalogs, using a simple conversion program to convert
longitude/latitude into Universal Addresses. Since telephone
catalogs are delivered to every home every year, it can
rapidly create wide availability of Universal Addresses.
Therefore, all people can obtain their Universal Addresses
immediately, and include them on their business cards,
advertisements, correspondences, tourist guides, etc.
Due to great influence of a large telecommunication
company, the introduction of such a revolutionary technology
will generate wide coverage of the technology and its enhanced
services on all media: newspapers, magazines, television,
radio, Internet, etc. This wide coverage will create vast
awareness in the public. This will be even more intensely in
Japan because the Introduction of the Natural Area Coding
System will not only benefit wireless location based services,
but also revolutionize Japanese address systems. Unlike
Western address systems, Japanese addresses are comprised of
prefecture, city, ward, district, chome, subsection of chome,
and building. All these components are not sequentially
distributed, named and numbered. Looking for a Japanese
address is a real time- consuming process that wastes huge
amount of precious time and causes numerous frustrations. A
Universal Address added as part of an address can solve all
the problems for Japan. It represents clear and accurate
spatial information which can be directly pinpointed on all
maps, navigated with GPS receivers and street signs enhanced
with the NAC technology.
Only when Universal Addresses
have been widely available and well known in an area, the
advantages of the technology will become significant, and all
NAC enhanced location based services will show their great
competitiveness.
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