Working with geospatial data (i.e. data that has a location element to it - such as addressing and property data or environmental and planning datasets) can be quite challenging if you're not familiar with the field. Geospatial data has a long history, stretching back decades and covering a wide range of sectors - government, industry, and academia.
In working with geospatial data you're likely to encounter a whole array of concepts (e.g. map projections and datums), terms (e.g. GIS, raster vs vector data), and data formats (e.g. Shapefiles, GeoJSON). We've pulled together a few of the best resources for the novice user of geospatial data to give you a quick primer on using geospatial data for visualisation and analysis tasks.
mapschool.io
A fantastic 15 minute introduction to many of the concepts, terms, and data formats you'll encounter in working with geospatial data. Highly recommended reading.
mapschool.io: a free introduction to geo
(Trust us - it'll save you much head scratching and bafflement later on.)
Geospatial data formats cheat sheet
In working with geospatial data you may encounter a wide range of different data and file formats (and APIs) that you'll likely never have seen before. Historically, many of the file formats in the geospatial industry have been proprietary or closed source, but that has begun to change in recent years with newer formats that utilising existing standards or are plain text (e.g. Spatialite databases built on SQLite, GeoJSON built on JSON).
We've pulled together a quick cheat sheet on some of the data formats you might encounter, and tips about which software applications you'll need to use to open them.
Cheat sheet for geospatial data formats
GovHack Hacker Toolkit
The GovHack Hacker Toolkit has two great resources for developers and data analysts that go into greater depth on the range of tools (applications and software libraries) that can be used with geospatial data.
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