Geocode

A geocode or geographic identifier (sometimes shortened as geo ID) is a code or unique identifier that represents a geographic entity (location or object), as distinguished from other entities in the same geocode system. In general, a geocode is a human-readable and short identifier. The ISO 19112 standard^[1] also admits long labels as geocodes.^[a] Geocodes are mainly used (in general as an atomic data type) for labelling, data integrity, geotagging and spatial indexing.

Typical geocodes (in bold) 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 AF subdivision codes (e.g. AF-GHO for Ghor province) or BR 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 6vd23gq at Brazil's centroid) or a Plus Code (e.g. ~0.0002 km² cell 58Q8XXXX+XX within the same area).
• Postal code. Polygon of a postal area: a CEP code (e.g. 70040 represents a Brazilian's central area for postal distribution).

In theoretical computer science a geocode system is a hash function, and, an important class of utilitarian geocode systems is described as a locality-preserving hashing function.

Classification

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 be hierarchical (name or grid) or non-hierarchical.
• Covering: global or partial. The entities (represented by the geocodes) are in all globe (e. g. geographical points) or is delimited the theme (e.g. only terrestrial areas) or by the ownership's jurisdiction (e.g. only into a country).
• Type of the represented entity: type of geometry. Point (the geocode can be translated to a Geo URI), grid cell (the geocode system is related with a DGG) or polygon (typically administrative boundaries delimitations).
  • special hierarchical grids, with global covering and equal-area cells, can be classified as DGGS cell^[2]
  • some non-standard geographic entities, can be classified also by its coordinate system and elipsoid of reference (e.g. UTM). The de facto standard is the WGS84.^[3]
• Scope of use: general use vs specialized (e.g. airport geocodes).

System

The set of all geocodes used as unique identifiers of the cells of a full-coverage of the geographic surface (or any well-defined area like a country or the oceans), is a geocode system (also named geocode scheme). The syntax and semantic of the geocodes are also components of the system definition:

• geocode syntax: the characters that can be used, blocks of characters and its size and order. Example: country codes use two letters of the alphabet (chacacter set A-Z). The most common way to describe formally is by regular expression (e.g. /[A-Z]{2,2}/).
• geocode semantic: the meaning of the geocode, usually expressed by associating the code with a geographical entity type. Can be described formally is by an ontology, an UML class diagram or any Entity-relationship model.
  In general the semantic can be deduced by its formation or encoding/decoding process. Example: each Geohash code can be expressed by a rectangular area in the map, and the rectangle coordinates is obtained by its decoding process.

Many syntax and semantic characteristics are also summarized by classification.

Systems of standard names

Main article: Toponym resolution

Geocodes like country codes, city codes, etc. comes from a table of official names, and the corresponding official codes and geometries (typically polygon of administrative areas). "Official" in the context of control and consensus, typically a table controlled by a standards organization or governmental authority. So, the most general case is a table of standard names and the corresponding standard codes (and its official geometries).

Strictly speaking, the "name" related to a geocode is a toponym, and the table (e.g. toponym to standard code) is the resource for toponym resolution: is the relationship process, usually effectuated by a software agent, between a toponym and "an unambiguous spatial footprint of the same place".^[5] Any standardized system of toponym resolution, having codes or encoded abbreviations, can be used as geocode system. The "resolver" agent in this context is also a geocoder.

Sometimes names are translated into numeric codes, to be compact or machine-readable. Since numbers, in this case, are name identifiers, we can consider "numeric names" — so this set of codes will be a kind of "system of standard names".

Hierarchical naming

In the geocode context, space partitioning is the process of dividing a geographical space into two or more disjoint subsets, resulting in a mosaic of subdivisions. Each subdivision can be partitioned again, recursively, resulting in an hierarchical mosaic.

When subdivisions's names are expressed as codes, and code syntax can be decomposed into a parent-child relations, through a well-defined syntactic scheme, the geocode set configures a hierarchical system. A geocode fragment (associated to a subdivision name) can be an abbreviation, numeric or alphanumeric code.

A popular example is the ISO 3166-2 geocode system, representing country names and the names of respective administrative subdivisions separated by hyphen. For example DE is Germany, a simple geocode, and its subdivisions (illustrated) are DE-BW for Baden-Württemberg, DE-BY for Bayern, ..., DE-NW for Nordrhein-Westfalen, etc. The scope is only the first level of the hierarchy. For more levels there are other conventions, like HASC – Hierarchical Administrative Subdivision Codes.^[6][7] The HASC codes are alphabetic and its fragments have constant length (2 letters). Examples:

DE.NW - North Rhine-Westphalia. A two-level hierarchical geocode.

DE.NW.CE - Kreis Coesfeld. A 3-level hierarchical geocode.

Two geocodes of a hierarchical geocode system with same prefix represents different parts of the same location. For instance DE.NW.CE and DE.NW.BN represents geographically interior parts of DE.NW, the common prefix.

Changing the subdivision criteria we can obtain other hierarchical systems. For example, for hydrological criteria there is a geocode system, the US's hydrologic unit code (HUC), that is a numeric representation of basin names in a hierarchical syntax schema (first level illustred). For example, the HUC 17 is the identifier of "Pacific Northwest Columbia basin"; HUC 1706 of "Lower Snake basin", a spatial subset of HUC 17 and a superset of 17060102 ("Imnaha River").

Systems of regular grids

Main article: DGG geocoding variants

Inspired in the classic alphanumeric grids, a discrete global grid (DGG) is a regular mosaic which covers the entire Earth's surface (the globe). The regularity of the mosaic is defined by the use of cells of same shape in all the grid, or "near the same shape and near same area" in a region of interest, like a country.

All cells of the grid have an identifier (DGG's cell ID), and the center of the cell can be used as reference for cell ID conversion into geographical point. When a compact human-readable expression of the cell ID is standardized, it becomes a geocode.

Geocodes of different geocode systems can represent the same position in the globe, with same shape and precision, but differ in string-length, digit-alphabet, separators, etc. Non-global grids also differ by scope, and in general are geometrically optimized (avoid overlaps, gaps or loss of uniformity) for the local use.

Hierarchical grids

Each cell of a grid can be transformed into a new local grid, in a recurring process. In the illustrated example, the cell TQ 2980 is a sub-cell of TQ 29, that is a sub-cell of TQ. A system of geographic regular grid references is the base of a hierarchical geocode system.

Two geocodes of a hierarchical geocode grid system can use the prefix rule: geocodes with same prefix represents different parts of the same broader location. Using again the side illustration: TQ 28 and TQ 61 represents geographically interior parts of TQ, the common prefix.

Hierarchical geocode can be split into keys. The Geohash 6vd23gq is the key q of the cell 6vd23g, that is a cell of 6vd23 (key g), and so on, per-digit keys. The OLC 58PJ642P is the key 48 of the cell 58PJ64, that is a cell of 58Q8 (key 48), and so on, two-digit keys. In the case of OLC there is a second key schema, after the + separator: 58PJ642P+48 is the key 2 of the cell 58PJ642P+4. It uses two key schemas. Some geocodes systems (e.g. S2 geometry) also use initial prefix with non-hierarchical key schema.

In general, as technical and non-compact optional representation, geocode systems (based on hierarchical grids) also offer the possibility of expressing their cell identifier with a fine-grained schema, by longer path of keys. For example, the Geohash 6vd2, which is a base32 code, can be expanded to base4 0312312002, which is also a schema with per-digit keys. Geometrically, each Geohash cell is a rectangle that subdivides space recurrently into 32 new rectangles, so, base4 subdividing into 4, is the encoding-expansion limit.^[8]

The uniformity of shape and area of cells in a grid can be important for other uses, like spatial statistics. There are standard ways to build a grid covering the entire globe with cells of equal area, regular shape and other properties: Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) is a series of discrete global grids satisfying all standardized requirements defined in 2017 by the OGC.^[9] When human-readable codes obtained from cell identifiers of a DGGS are also standardized, it can be classified as DGGS based geocode system.

Shortening grid-based codes by context

Any geocode system based on regular grid, in general is also a shorter way to express a latitudinal/longitudinal coordinate. But a geocode with more than 6 characters is difficult for remember. On the other hand, a geocode based on standard name (or abbreviation or the complete name) is easier to remember.

This suggests that a "mixed code" can solve the problem, reducing the number of characters when a name can be used as the "context" for the grid-based geocode. For example, in a book where the author says "all geocodes here are contextualized by the chapter's city". In the chapter about Paris, where all places have a Geohash with prefix u09, that code can be removed —. For instance Geohash u09tut can be reduced to tut, or, by an explicit code for context "FR-Paris tut". This is only possible when the context resolution (e.g. translation from "FR-Paris" to the prefix u09) is well-known.

In fact a methodology exists for hierarchical grid-based geocodes with non-variable size, where the code prefix describes a broader area, which can be associated with a name. So, it is possible to shorten by replacing the prefix to the associated context. The most usual context is an official name. Examples:

The examples of the Mixed reference column are significantly easier than remembering DGG code column. The methods vary, for example OLC can be shortened by elimination of its first four digits and attaching a suitable sufficiently close locality.^[11]

When the mixed reference is also short (9 characters in the second example) and there are a syntax convention to express it (suppose CP‑PR~bgxed), this convention is generating a new name-and-grid geocode system. This is not the case of the first example because, strictly speaking, "Cape Verde, Praia" is not a code.

To be both, a name-and-grid system and also a mixed reference convention, the system must be reversible. Pure name-and-grid systems, like Mapcode, with no way to transform it into a global code, is not a mixed reference, because there is no algorithm to transform the mixed geocode into a grid-based geocode.

Cataloged examples

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Other examples

Other geocodes:

• S2: a geocoding scheme using spherical geometry and the space-filling Hilbert curve, developed at Google^[19][20]
• H3: Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index a geocoding scheme initially developed at Uber ^[21] source code available ^[22] and documented at h3geo ^[23]
• fullercode: Hierarchical Discrete Global Grid. A subdivision of the Fuller projection into triangles under Apache-2.0 licence.
• Munich Orientation Convention: converts lat/lon to metrical monopolar codes for targets, crossings, stations, stop points, bridges, tunnels, towns, islands, volcanoes, highway exits etc.^[24]
• SALB (Second Administrative Level Boundaries), by UN ^[25]
• OpenPostcode, opensource global algorithm (local adaptations as Irish & Hong Kong postcodes).^[26]
• WOEID
• OpenStreetMap shortlink, used as a short permanent link to map locations^[27]
• Quarter Degree Grid Cells
• NAC (patented), area codes (area can be indefinitely small)
• GEOID, the name of United States Census Bureau geographic identifiers.^[28]
• In the United States, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Codes are often used. ANSI INCITS 446-2008 is entitled "Identifying Attributes for Named Physical and Cultural Geographic Features (Except Roads and Highways) of the United States, Its Territories, Outlying Areas, and Freely Associated Areas, and the Waters of the Same to the Limit of the Twelve-Mile Statutory Zone".
• National Topographic System in Canada
• ONS coding system (hierarchical code used in the UK for tabulating census)

See also

• Census tract
• Geolocation
• Geotagging
• Geographic information retrieval
• Global Navigation Grid Code (China geocode?)
• ISO 6709, standard representation of geographic point location by coordinates
• Place code
• Unique Property Reference Number
• Unique Street Reference Number

Notes

References

External links

• Media related to Geocodes at Wikimedia Commons