METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR UNIVERSAL AND UNIFIED LOCATION REPRESENTATION AND ITS INTERACTION WITH GPS DEVICES

Location information is translated from a variety of formats to a common uniform format and then fed into a GPS device in an easy and automatic manner. A global canonical and unique numeric representation of a specific location is created. This involves a global bi-directional translation method between an address, which may reside or presently exist in one of many possible formats, into a uniform standardized canonical representation of location. The uniform location representation can be read by, and later transferred into, a GPS device. Advantageously, this eases the process of finding desired destinations in various ways, and the ease of storing location data regarding those destinations.