Universal address needs only 10 digits — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Easy way to define location anywhere in the world} Universal address needs only 10 digits

14 Nov 2004 at 09:39 GMT Timo Poropudas

Defining an exact location without exact longitude and latitude information can very difficult outside your own and familiar surroundings. It is especially tricky outside your own language area where different alphabet is in use.

However, using location based navigation systems requires the user to express his destination. Even the best navigation system cannot help if it does have the destination coordinates.

NAC Geographic Products Inc., the developer of the Universal Address System, Thursday announced that Australia, Greece and Slovakia have been added to the countries digitized with Universal Addresses and Natural Area Codes.

The new inclusions take the number of the Universal Address digitized countries to 22: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland (Uusimaa, Häme, and Pirkanmaa regions), France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States.

The Universal Address System has been developed to solve problems related to expressing the address or location anywhere in the world.

8 characters for any building

An eight character Universal Address can uniquely specify every building in the world. A ten-character address can uniquely specify any square meter in the world. They are easily remembered, can be pinpointed on all maps and navigated with GPS receivers.

The Universal Address System introduces a highly efficient unified representation of an address, postal code, area code, geographic coordinates and map grid coordinates in the world. It connects all location related products, services and technologies.

About one billion people from countries with Universal Address can immediately get their Universal Addresses on Universal Address Lookup Service and access the highly efficient and reliable Universal Address powered cross-country cross-language turn-by-turn driving directions services on TravelGIS Driving Directions Service from their desktop computers.

They can also use any kind of wireless devices to get turn-by-turn driving directions, maps and location based business searches in North America, Europe, Brazil and Australia powered by Universal Addresses on Mobile Location Based Services Network.

“Now another continent has been digitized by the Universal Address System thanks to Microsoft MapPoint Web Service that provides the world most comprehensive street address databases.

“On Universal Address powered location based services, people will no longer be frustrated by wrong locations of street addresses, unfound street addresses and locations without addresses as seen frequently on the driving directions/map services of MSN, Yahoo, MapQuest, etc,” said Dr. Xinhang Shen, President of NAC Geographic Products Inc.

“There are no Universal Addresses that can not be found, and there are no locations on this planet that don’t have Universal Addresses.”

Using Universal Addresses to specify locations instead of traditional street addresses on location based services can reduce 80 percent of input characters, avoid difficulties in inputting addresses with foreign characters, eliminate errors from address databases and extend location based services to all locations no matter whether there are addresses or not.

The 80 percent reduction of input is significant in using wireless devices with small key pad to access location based services. The short Universal Addresses also make the entire input interface of a driving directions service fit on a single screen of a small mobile phone. A Universal Address is so short that can be included as part of an address on any business card.