Natural Area Coding System Extended to Mobile Location Based Services Network (MLBS.NET)

Wireless Developer Network - You may (or may not) be familiar with the Natural Area Coding System (NACS). If not I suspect you will be in the near future. Last year I was fortunate enough to have been contacted by the developer, Xinhang Shen, President, NAC Geographic Products Inc. Recall we featured a story by Dr. Shen which introduced us to NACS (See Digitize the Entire Earth). The Natural Area Coding System has been developed in order to generated Natural Area Codes for all areas from the size of thousand kilometers to one meter or even smaller derived from longitude/latitude coordinates. The derived eight or ten character Universal Address has a similar length of telephone numbers, can easily fit into the limited space of business cards, yellow page listings, advertisements, etc., and perhaps most important, they can be pinpointed on all maps with Universal Map Grids no matter the scale. They can also be displayed on all GPS receivers without support of databases or maps.

Since publishing that original article, Dr. Shen has taken NACS to the next level. The Universal Address System on MLBS.NET - a wireless location based services application providing driving directions, street maps and location based searches of businesses for entire North America and most of Europe. MLBS.NET provides highly efficient, cross-nation and cross-language Location-Based Services.

MLBS.NET is best described as a comprehensive wireless LBS. The technology is powered by NAC technology and Microsoft MapPoint Web Service. Users of the service have access to driving directions, location based business search and maps for more than 30 countries in Europe and North America. MLBS.NET supports wired and wireless devices including desktop PCs, PDAs, Pocket PC, cellphones, and other devices. Get this the service is supported in eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish.

Using MLBS.NET, users can specify street addresses, intersections, Universal Addresses, Natural Area Codes, points of interests, place names or ZIP/postal codes to specify starting and ending locations for driving directions. If a Universal Address or Natural Area Code is specified, the derived driving directions service can be extended to include 25 countries: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland (Helsinki only), France, Germany, Ireland (limited outside of Dublin), Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, Norway (Oslo only), Portugal, Puerto Rico, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States, and Vatican City. Imagine specifying the following command... "please provide driving directions from The Vancouver Trade & Convention Center, BC., Canada to The London eye please"! If street addresses, street intersections, points of interests, place names