June 27, 2007, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of the NAC Enhanced Google Driving Directions - an integration of Natural Area Coding System and Google Driving Directions through Google's powerful AJAX APIs to provide a truely language-independent global service to connect any locations in the world no matter whether there are street addresses or not.



The NAC Enhanced Google Driving Directions allows users to use a Natural Area Code (NAC) in addition to latitude/longitude coordinates, street addresses, POIs and ZIP/postcodes to specify start, stop and end locations. A NAC is an efficiently represention of any area and 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, the Universal Address of Washington Monument is NAC: 8KDB PGFD. 

 

"Currently, the tourist industry seems to have only one option, i.e., to use street addresses to represent the locations of attractions and facilities on advertisements and travel brochures. These street addresses are language-dependent and are nearly impossible for many foreign people to input into a computer in order to get driving directions, and therefore, many people may skip the facilities with difficult addresses which causes the loss of customers and sales for their operators," said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc. "Now highly efficient and language-independent Universal Addresses can be added to represent these locations, just as done by many camp grounds, with which drivers can immediately get the driving directions, which will greatly benefit both tourists and operators. "

NAC Enhanced Google Driving Directions not only gives you directions to houses and buildings, but also to any locations (fire hydrants, electric wire poles, street lights, potholes, sewage exits, fishing spots, trees, BBQ tables, emergency locations, etc) thanks to the Universal Addresses.

If you don't have the Universal Address of a given location, you can obtain it on Universal Address Lookup Service and NAC Enhanced Google Maps. If you want to find the Universal Address of a business or tourist attraction near any given location, try NAC Enhanced Google Local Search which will list the Universal Address of each found business (you can also use a Universal Address to specify the location for the local search). If you want to get the Universal Address of your current location, you can use a NAC enhanced GPS receiver to measure it, such as Locamagic (which also provides all NAC enhanced locating/positioning, navigating, biz searching, tracking and monitoring services).

If you have a WAP capable cellphone, you can get all the NAC enhanced location based services on Mobile Location Based Services Network. If you want to find underwater treasures, please check GeoDiving which lists all available treasures with their Universal Addresses.

The release of NAC Enhanced Google Driving Directions marks the mature of the era for all people in the world to use the Universal Address for all daily activities, just like accurate time.

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 GIS software products and provides real-time geo-services (geocoding, reverse-geocoding, mapping, driving directions, nearby business searching and traffic information) for web applications and wireless location based services.