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.