How do The Natural Area Coding System improve the storing and retrieving of geographic and geospatial data?
Since The Natural Area Coding System has generated simple NACs for all areas on the earth and three-dimensional regions in the universe and short coordinates for all geodetic points, the system can significantly improve the structure of a geographic or geospatial database and reduce its storage size more than 80%. One of the structures of the system for managing a geographic database is described in the following: A NAC geographic information database for the whole earth surface stored in a computer contains two main directories. The first main directory is called the main NAC directory under which all geographic information is saved according to the NAC structure. The second main directory is called the main index directory under which all the information about geographic identities are linked to the NAC areas and the information about these identities can be retrieved from the NAC directories through the linkage. The main NAC directory contains several files and first level NAC direc
