Every user of geospatial data has experienced the challenge of obtaining, organizing, storing, sharing, and visualizing their data. The variety of formats and data structures and the disparate quality of geospatial data can result in a dizzying accumulation of useful and useless pieces of spatially explicit information that must be poked, prodded, and wrangled into a single, unified dataset. This chapter addresses the fundamental concerns related to data acquisition and management of geospatial data’s various formats and qualities currently available in modern geographic information system (GIS) projects.

Learning Objectives

• Introduce different data types, measurement scales, and data capture methods.
• Understand the basic properties of a relational database management system.
• Overview of a sample of the most common vectors, raster, and hybrid file formats.
• Ascertain the diverse types of error inherent in geospatial datasets.

Chapter Sections

• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.2 Geographic Data Acquisition
• 5.3 Geospatial Database Management
• 5.4 File Formats
• 5.5 Data Quality
• 5.6 References