Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 27, 2026

Place code

A P-code, short for place code, is a kind of geocode used mostly by emergency response teams. It provides unique identifiers to thousands of locations and administrative units in a humanitarian operation. The p-codes are represented by combinations of letters and/or numbers to identify a specific location or feature on a map or within a database. These codes provide a systematic means of linking data to an unambiguous location. Any information that is tagged with P-codes can be combined and analyzed with any other p-coded data. The p-codes for a country can be found in the Common Operational Datasets, which are standard geographic references for the humanitarian community provided by UN OCHA:

Last revised
May 27, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
128 w
Citations
Source

A P-code, short for place code, is a kind of geocode used mostly by emergency response teams. It provides unique identifiers to thousands of locations and administrative units in a humanitarian operation. The p-codes are represented by combinations of letters and/or numbers to identify a specific location or feature on a map or within a database. These codes provide a systematic means of linking data to an unambiguous location. Any information that is tagged with P-codes can be combined and analyzed with any other p-coded data. The p-codes for a country can be found in the Common Operational Datasets, which are standard geographic references for the humanitarian community provided by UN OCHA:

References

References