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Spatial vs Geospatial [2]

By • • Knowledge, Public, Research, Teaching • , , • 3 minutes of reading

Mike Goodchild believes that we should make a distinction between spatial and geospatial believing that if spatial is special then geospatial is even more special! The way he sees it is that geospatial is a subset of something much larger that encompases any spatiotemporal frame, any spatial resoultion, non-Cartesian spaces and metrics and so on.  Spatial represents the big picture while geospatial carves out its own area of interest at on on the earth’s surface  He goes on to suggest that any theory of geospatial (geographic information) should be developed quite separetely from a theory of spatial (spatial information) with the proviso […]

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Spatial vs Geospatial [1]

By • • Knowledge, Public, Research, Teaching • , , , , • 2 minutes of reading

Often my students ask about the difference(s) between spatial and geospatial. These two words appear very frequently in remote sensing and GIS literature. The word spatial originated from Latin ‘spatium’, which means space. Spatial means ‘pertaining to space’ or ‘having to do with space, relating to space and the position, size, shape, etc.’ (Oxford Dictionary), which refers to features or phenomena distributed in three-dimensional space (any space, not only the Earth’s surface) and, thus, having physical, measurable dimensions. In GIS, ‘spatial’ is also referred to as ‘based on location on map’. Geographic(al) means ‘pertaining to geography (the study of the

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