The Natural Area Code is a proprietary geocode system for identifying an area anywhere on the Earth, or a volume anywhere in the universe. The use of thirty alphanumeric characters instead of only ten digits makes a NAC shorter than its numerical latitude/longitude[/altitude] equivalent.
The system is copyrighted by NAC Geographic Products, Inc.
The NAC represents an area on the earth. When the represented area is small enough, a NAC represents a location. Therefore, it is a unified representation of both an area and a location. An eight or ten character NAC is also called a Universal Address, because it can uniquely specify every building, house, parking meter, fire hydrant, street light, tree or any other fixed object in the world. An eight-character NAC specifies an area no larger than 25 metres by 50 metres, while a ten-character NAC cell is no larger than 0.8 metres by 1.6 metres.
For example, the ten-character NAC for the centre of the city of Brussels is HBV6R RG77T.
