About GEODOSU and Kyoto’s address

京都通り名ジオコーダーAPI『ジオどす』

Kyoto is the most famous city in Japan. 50-million tourists visit Kyoto every year. Imagine that you are planning to visit Kyoto. You search location of hotel or restaurants. But you are never able to search their location on Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or any Map services. Do you know why?

The reason is that Kyoto has two address systems. One is postal addresses, and other one is traditional addresses.

A postal address was determined by government after the World War II, and almost all people in Japan use it.
However, only Kyoto has another address system – traditional one -, and people usually use traditional one called ‘Street Address’.

Kyoto was build about 1,200 years ago as a capital of Japan. It was a fully planned city designed after the example of ‘Changan (Xian)’, the capital of Ancient China.
Streets are build North-South direction and East-West direction in equal distance, and each street has a unique name.
Because of its street design, it is possible to locate anywhere by two street names. For example, if a location is on east of a road crossing of "A Street" and "B Street", address is like "A and B, East".

1200 years later, Street address is still active. But, only because it is not a postal address, Map system can’t handle it. You can't search even in Japanese, so searching in English is not a chance.

GEODOSU (http://geodosu.com) is the first map service to handle Kyoto Street Addresses, and now proudly featuring multi lingual search. You can search Kyoto’s address in English, Chinese, or Korean, from PC or mobile phone.

Note: GEO-DOSU
'GEO': Geographic Information System
'DOSU': Kyoto's dialect of auxiliary verbs of assertion

Geodosu Inc.