Bio

Kewal Shienmar – Seasoned professional with experience in Satellite Navigation, GIS and LBS. He possesses a unique blend of businessand technicalacumens with a wide knowledge of digital maps and their market. He has previously worked for Navteq (Here Maps) and in 2006; he joined TomTom, a global leader in navigation and mapping products. Since 2012, Kewal has been active in location encoding as Managing Director of the Mapcode Foundation where he has co-launched mapcodes and is responsible for providing the solution as a free worldwide addressing standard.

Abstract

Mapcode - A Short Address for Any Location on Earth
A mapcode is a code consisting of two groups of letters and digits, separated by a dot. It represents a location on the surface of the Earth. The mapcode system is a free, brand-less, international standard for representing any location anywhere. It is a short, easy to recognize and remember “code”, between 4 and 7 characters long. Accurate enough for public, every-day use, mapcodes are supported in over 60m car navigation devices world-wide. Although useful in any country, mapcodes are particularly handy where there is no address or postal system; a bench in a park, an informal dwelling in Mumbai – has such a short code. It uniquely identifies that particular location and brings you to within a few metres of it. The mapcode system uses a method to convert between the latitude and longitude of a location and works on any map. By analyzing map data, a table has been created that defines mapcodes for every “context” on earth. Each country, nation,overseas dependency, autonomous and semi-autonomous state, province and republic is coded. It also defines the most densely populated areas in each of these territories and assigns the shortest mapcodes for them. Developed in 2001 by the founders of TomTom, Pieter Geelen and Harold Goddijn, mapcodes have been donated to The Mapcode Foundation, which is responsible for ensuring the technology is made freely available to everyone.