US Patent 7302343 Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates

Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers. A set of base-N string representations are generated for the integers (N represents the number of characters in an implementation-defined character set being utilized). The latitude string and longitude string are then concatenated to yield a single output string. The output string is utilized as a geographic indicator with a URL.