Recent trends in technology and society - such as the widespread availability of high-resolution global data sets, the need to accurately model important problems such as global climate change, and GPS-equipped mobile devices - have led to an explosive growth in the number and importance of computer applications that represent and manipulate data referenced to the surface of the earth. Current approaches to computer location representation, which are based on traditional paper-based mapping techniques, are inadequate to meet the challenges of the next generation of location-based applications. Oregon researchers are at the leading edge of defining one promising new approach to this problem. In this presentation we will discuss the motivations for this approach, which we call “discrete global grids,” and give a summary of past and current research results.