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GIS File Formats
A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies (such as the USGS or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers. History The first GIS installations of the 1960s, such as the Canada Geographic Information System were based on bespoke software and stored data in bespoke file structures designed for the needs of the particular project. As more of these appeared, they could be compared to find best practices and common structures. When general-purpose GIS software was developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, including programs from acad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geographical Information
Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also called geospatial data and information, georeferenced data and information, as well as geodata and geoinformation. Approximately 90% of government sourced data has a location component. Location information (known by the many names mentioned here) is stored in a geographic information system (GIS). There are also many different types of geodata, including vector files, raster files, geographic databases, web files, and multi-temporal data. Fields of study Geographic data and information are the subject of a number of overlapping fields of study, mainly: * Geocomputation * Geographic information science * Geoinformatics * Geomatics * Geovisualization This is in addition to other more specific branches, such as: * Cartography * Geodesy * Geo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spatial Data Transfer Standard
Spatial Data Transfer Standard, or SDTS, is a standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ... used to describe earth-referenced spatial data. It was designed to easily transfer and use spatial data on different computer platforms. The FGDC has proposed to withdraw the standard. The USGS made an effort to promulgate the standard by making a large volume of data available at no cost and many companies supported the standard by writing translators to transform the data into different formats. External links FGDC requests comment on proposal to withdraw Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS), Parts 1-7Official USGS SDTS web site*GeoCommunity: SDTS Resources, Articles, and Features {{Cartography-stub Cartography GIS file formats United States Geological Survey ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Compression
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information. Typically, a device that performs data compression is referred to as an encoder, and one that performs the reversal of the process (decompression) as a decoder. The process of reducing the size of a data file is often referred to as data compression. In the context of data transmission, it is called source coding; encoding done at the source of the data before it is stored or transmitted. Source coding should not be confused with channel coding, for error detection and correction or line coding, the means for mapping data onto a signal. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GeoTIFF
GeoTIFF is a public domain metadata standard which allows georeferencing information to be embedded within a TIFF file. The potential additional information includes map projection, coordinate systems, ellipsoids, datums, and everything else necessary to establish the exact spatial reference for the file. The GeoTIFF format is fully compliant with TIFF 6.0, so software incapable of reading and interpreting the specialized metadata will still be able to open a GeoTIFF format file. An alternative to the "inlined" TIFF geospatial metadata is the *.tfw World File sidecar file format which may sit in the same folder as the regular TIFF file to provide a subset of the functionality of the standard GeoTIFF described here. History The GeoTIFF format was originally created by Dr. Niles Ritter while he was working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The reference implementation code was released mostly as public domain software with some parts under a permissive X license. On Septembe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary File
A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document files containing formatted text, such as older Microsoft Word document files, contain the text of the document but also contain formatting information in binary form. Structure Binary files are usually thought of as being a sequence of bytes, which means the binary digits (bits) are grouped in eights. Binary files typically contain bytes that are intended to be interpreted as something other than text characters. Compiled computer programs are typical examples; indeed, compiled applications are sometimes referred to, particularly by programmers, as binaries. But binary files can also mean that they contain images, sounds, compressed versions of other files, etc. – in short, any type of file content whatsoever. Some binary files contain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other serializable values). It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with servers. JSON is a language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data. JSON filenames use the extension .json. Any valid JSON file is a valid JavaScript (.js) file, even though it makes no changes to a web page on its own. Douglas Crockford originally specified the JSON format in the early 2000s. He and Chip Morningstar sent the first JSON message in April 2001. Naming and pronunciation The 2017 international standard (ECMA-404 and ISO/IEC 21778:2017) specifies "Pronounced , as in 'Jason and The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Text File
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating systems such as CP/M and MS-DOS, where the operating system does not keep track of the file size in bytes, the end of a text file is denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. On modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, text files do not contain any special EOF character, because file systems on those operating systems keep track of the file size in bytes. Most text files need to have end-of-line delimiters, which are done in a few different ways depending on operating system. Some operating systems with record-orientated file systems may not use new line delimiters and will primarily store text files with lines separat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GeoJSON
GeoJSON is an open standard format designed for representing simple geographical features, along with their non-spatial attributes. It is based on the JSON format. The features include points (therefore addresses and locations), line strings (therefore streets, highways and boundaries), polygons (countries, provinces, tracts of land), and multi-part collections of these types. GeoJSON features need not represent entities of the physical world only; mobile routing and navigation apps, for example, might describe their service coverage using GeoJSON. The GeoJSON format differs from other GIS standards in that it was written and is maintained not by a formal standards organization, but by an Internet working group of developers. A notable offspring of GeoJSON is TopoJSON, an extension of GeoJSON that encodes geospatial topology and that typically provides smaller file sizes. History The GeoJSON format working group and discussion were begun in March 2007 and the format specific ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Keyhole Markup Language
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files, but other projects such as Marble have added KML support. Structure The KML file specifies a set of features (place marks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) that can be displayed on maps in geospatial software implementing the KML encoding. Every place has a longitude and a latitude. Other data can make a view more specific, such as tilt, heading, or altitude, which together define a "camera view" along with a timestamp or timespan. KML shares some of the same structura ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spatial Database
A spatial database is a general-purpose database (usually a relational database) that has been enhanced to include spatial data that represents objects defined in a geometric space, along with tools for querying and analyzing such data. Most spatial databases allow the representation of simple geometric objects such as points, lines and polygons. Some spatial databases handle more complex structures such as 3D objects, topological coverages, linear networks, and triangulated irregular networks (TINs). While typical databases have developed to manage various numeric and character types of data, such databases require additional functionality to process spatial data types efficiently, and developers have often added ''geometry'' or ''feature'' data types. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) developed the Simple Features specification (first released in 1997) and sets standards for adding spatial functionality to database systems. The '' SQL/MM Spatial'' ISO/IEC standard is a pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GDAL
The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library. The related ''OGR'' library (OGR Simple Features Library), which is part of the GDAL source tree, provides a similar ability for simple features vector graphics data. GDAL was developed mainly by Frank Warmerdam until the release of version 1.3.2, when maintenance was officially transferred to the GDAL/OGR Project Management Committee under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. GDAL/OGR is considered a major free softw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library (computer Science)
In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications. In IBM's OS/360 and its successors they are referred to as partitioned data sets. A library is also a collection of implementations of behavior, written in terms of a language, that has a well-defined interface by which the behavior is invoked. For instance, people who want to write a higher-level program can use a library to make system calls instead of implementing those system calls over and over again. In addition, the behavior is provided for reuse by multiple independent programs. A program invokes the library-provided behavior via a mechanism of the language. For example, in a simple imperative language such as C, the behavior in a library is invoked by using C's normal function ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
