13.2 Understanding Spatial Data

Spatial data involves a combination of information about locations and geometric features related that best describe the location. The most commonly used formats to store spatial information are Raster and Vector. A Raster format is a type of digital image represented by grids which can be reduced and enlarged. They are made up of a matrix of pixels with each pixel representing an area within the spatial object. A Vector format consists of geometric shapes organized in the form of shapefiles. A shapefile consist of three files under the extensions .shp, .shx and .dbf which contain the features, indices of shapes and attributes respectively.

---

If you find this curated material useful then you can consider a donation to support it's ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. The material has been scoped up by Generative AI without permission or any kind of recompense so do consider a donation if you can afford it. Unlike Generative AI your access to this materials is freely given. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Togaware has a 30 year tradition of making popular open source software which includes sold privacy preserving productivity apps, rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0