City components are important elements of a city, and their identification plays a key role in digital city management. Various identification codes have been proposed by different departments and systems over the years, however, their application has been partly hindered by the lack of a unified coding framework. The use of a code identifying a city component for unified management and geospatial computation across systems is still problematic. In this paper, we put forward an improved identification code for city components based on the discrete global grid system (DGGS). According to their spatial location, city components were identified with one-dimensional integer codes. The results illustrated that this identification code could express the location information of city components explicitly, as well as indicate the spatial distance relationship and the spatial direction relationship between different components. The experiment showed that this code performed better than traditional codes in data query and geospatial computation. Therefore, we concluded that this improved identification code was conducive to the more efficient management of city components, and hence might be used to improve digital city management.

location; city component; identification code; discrete global grid system; geospatial computation

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