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A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity (location or object). It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the geocode is a human-readable and short identifier. Typical geocodes and entities represented by it: Country code and subdivision code. Polygon of the administrative boundaries of a country or a subdivision. The main examples are ISO codes: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (e.g. AF for Afghanistan or BR for Brazil), and its subdivision conventions, such as subdivision codes (e.g. AF-GHO for Ghor province) or subdivision codes (e.g. BR-AM for Amazonas state). DGG cell ID. Identifier of a cell of a discrete global grid: a Geohash code (e.g. ~0.023 km2 cell 6vjyngd at the Brazilian's center) or an OLC code (e.g. ~0.004 km2 cell 58PJ642P+4 at the same point). Postal code. Polygon of a postal area: a CEP code (e.g. 70040 represents a Brazilian's central area for postal distribution). The ISO 19112:2019 standard (section 3.1.2) adopted the term "geographic identifier" instead geocode, to encompass long labels: spatial reference in the form of a label or code that identifies a location. For example, for ISO, the country name “People's Republic of China” is a label. Geocodes are mainly used (in general as an atomic data type) for labelling, data integrity, geotagging and spatial indexing. In theoretical computer science a geocode system is a locality-preserving hashing function. There are some common aspects of many geocodes (or geocode systems) that can be used as classification criteria: Ownership: proprietary or free, differing by its licences. Formation: the geocode can be originated from a name (ex. abbreviation of official name the country) or from mathematical function (encoding algorithm to compress latitude-longitude). See geocode system types below (of names and of grids). Hierarchy: geocode's syntax hierarchy corresponding to the spatial hierarchy of its represented entities. A geocode system can hierarchical (name or grid) or non-hierarchical.

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Geocoding of worldwide patent data

Gaétan Jean A de Rassenfosse

The dataset provides geographic coordinates for inventor and applicant locations in 18.8 million patent documents spanning over more than 30 years. The geocoded data are further allocated to the corresponding countries, regions and cities. When the address ...

2019

Configuring Spatial Grids for Efficient Main Memory Joins

Anastasia Ailamaki, Thomas Heinis, Farhan Tauheed

The performance of spatial joins is becoming increasingly important in many applications, particularly in the scientific domain. Several approaches have been proposed for joining spatial datasets on disk and few in main memory. Recent results show that in ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2015

Discrete global grid

A discrete global grid (DGG) is a mosaic that covers the entire Earth's surface. Mathematically it is a space partitioning: it consists of a set of non-empty regions that form a partition of the Earth's surface. In a usual grid-modeling strategy, to simplify position calculations, each region is represented by a point, abstracting the grid as a set of region-points. Each region or region-point in the grid is called a cell.

Geotagging

Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names, and perhaps a time stamp. Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information from a device.

Geohash

Geohash is a public domain geocode system invented in 2008 by Gustavo Niemeyer which encodes a geographic location into a short string of letters and digits. Similar ideas were introduced by G.M. Morton in 1966. It is a hierarchical spatial data structure which subdivides space into buckets of grid shape, which is one of the many applications of what is known as a Z-order curve, and generally space-filling curves. Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision).