There are three somewhat different approaches to spatial coding (Sometimes also named geocoding)
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Addresses. Addresses follow a rather standard format of street name, house number, city, state/region, zip code, and country. Converting addresses to locations is what is commonly called geocoding, and several national and international web services can do this.
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administrative units. There are many codes for administrative units and if often do not think of them as standards the to character codes appearing on European numberplates are as the national internet addresses (DK = Denmark) are for instance specified be ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. This is only one of the many administrative units you probably will come across when working with geospatial data
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Codes for areas in a regular grid Many countries and international organisations operate with regular grids to organise statistical information one such grid system is the European commissions GISgrid (GISCO grid) og grids 1 to 100 km