Editing Geocode (section)

=== Encode and decode ===

Any geocode can be translated from a formal (and expanded) expression of the geographical entity, or vice versa, the geocode translated to entity. The first is named '''encode''' process, the second '''decode'''. The actors and process involved, as defined by [[Open Geospatial Consortium|OGC]],<ref name="OGC">Definitions of the [[Open Geospatial Consortium|OGC]]'s "[https://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/glossary/g Glossary of Terms]".</ref> are:

;geocoder: A [[software agent]] that transforms the description of a geographic entity (e.g. location name or latitude/longitude coordinates), into a normalized data and encodes it as a geocode.

;geocoder service: A geocoder implemented as [[web service]] (or similar service interface), that accepts a set of geographic entity descriptors as input. The request is "sent" to the Geocoder Service, which processes the request and returns the resulting geocodes. More general services can also return geographic features (e.g. [[GeoJSON]] object) represented by the geocodes.

;geocoding: Geocoding refers to the assignment of geocodes or coordinates to geographically reference data provided in a textual format. Examples are the two letter country codes and coordinates computed from addresses.<br /> Note: when a [[Address#Current addressing schemes|physical addressing schemes]] (street name and house number) is expressed in a standardized and simplified way, it can be conceived as geocode. So, the term [[geocoding]] (used for addresses)  sometimes is generalized for geocodes.

In spatial indexing applications the geocode can also be translated between human-readable (e.g. [[hexadecimal]]) and internal (e.g. [[64-bit computing|binary 64-bit unsigned integer]]) representations.