Ogle Earth posts on NAC Earth, a Google-Earth addon that lets you navigate to a Natural Area Coding (NAC) location. Never heard of NAC? Neither had I until this post. It’s apparently a proprietary universal address system that can assign a sequence of up to 8 letters and digits to any geographic location or landmark; Stefan at Ogle Earth describes it as the geographic equivalent of tinyurl. He also doesn’t see much need for it, and truthfully neither do I – if you want to describe a location by a semi-cryptic series of letters and numbers, you can always use MGRS. Given that the system has been around now for five years without picking up any traction, I’m guessing others feel the same way.
Need to convert a set of geographic coordinates to an NAC code? Try Barry Hunter’s online coordinate converter. The NACGeo site also has some free online services for looking up and plotting NAC locations.