Geospatial data is data about objects, events, or phenomena that have a location on the surface of the earth. Geospatial data combines location information (usually coordinates on the earth), attribute information (the characteristics of the object, event, or phenomena concerned), and often also temporal information. Much geospatial data is of general interest to a wide range of users. For example, roads, localities, water bodies, and public amenities are useful as reference information for a number of purposes. For this reason, whether collected by public or private organizations, large amounts of geospatial data are available as open data.¹ Therefore, geospatial data issues deal with problems of scale, format, and inaccuracies within the data. In this unit, I explore concepts such as geocoding and georeferencing data.

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_{1 Kristin Stock, Hans Guesgen, in Automating Open Source Intelligence, 2016}.