ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how spatial objects, events, and processes are structured in data, how attribute data are stored, and how spatiality and attributes are all encoded in geospatial data. Probably the best-known data model for storing attribute data is the table view of the world, which became popular with the prevalence of relational databases. The chapter describes the different data formats and competently work with both spatial and attribute data in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Geospatial data formats are either vector or raster data structures in which vector data is associated with geometry type and raster has a fixed spatial resolution. Spatial aspects of the world are structured as data in GIS. Data model is used to encode aspects of entities that are relevant to an application domain. There are two fundamentally different data structures used to represent the spatial aspects of the world—raster and vector.
