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Cartographic data can come from a number of sources with different features and functions, but one thing that they have in common is that they are tied to the geography of the Earth. Digital geographic data may include such information as the location of rivers, roads, hills, and valleys and even political boundaries. Remote sensing can provide data about land use – farms, forests and towns. Meteorological data can inform about weather patterns – storms, temperature, rainfall, air quality and so on. Satellites can also capture information such as terrain and topology which can be represented using GIS applications.
What is Geodata? A Guide to Geospatial Data - GIS Geography
Geospatial data ****is information that describes objects, events or other features with a location on or near the surface of the earth. Geographic data can be represented either as geometries (like SVG files) or as pixels (like jpg/png etc.) depending on the type of data.
Geographic data that can be represented as points(single location), lines (connecting two places) or polygons (a region) is vector in nature.
Some of the common file formats for vector data – KML, GeoJSON, TopoJSON, Shapefiles
At times, it can also be represented as a csv using Well-Known Text (WKT).
Geographic data that is encoded as grayscale or RGB values in a pixels grid is raster in nature. The grids are are usually regularly spaced and square but they don’t have to be. Raster data creates imagery that’s substantially more complex, such as photographs, digital elevation models and satellite images.
Raster data is commonly available as GeoTIFF files.
Besides the usual ones, geographic data can also come in various other forms like databases (e.g. GDB for storing multiple attribute tables, vector and raster data sets) or formats based on type of data source (e.g. NetCDF for climate datasets over time).