Geocode

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 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 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.