Exploring geographic data

It may seem obvious, but before you can work with data in a GIS, the data must be in a digital format. What's not so obvious is how you translate real-world features into digital features. The device that determines how real-world features are represented digitally is called a data model.

A data model defines how to abstract real-world features into a format that can be understood by a computer. In the GIS world, there are two main data models used to represent features. In this topic, you will explore these two data models as well as some common geographic data formats that are based on each.