mapscaping.com

The shapefile has been declared dead more times than any format in GIS, and yet it remains the default way spatial data gets handed around. Sooner or later someone emails you a ZIP full of .shp, .dbf and .prj files and just wants to know: what is in this thing?

Installing QGIS or requesting an ArcGIS license is overkill for that question. Browser-based viewers can now ...

GeoTIFF is the workhorse raster format of GIS: elevation models, satellite imagery, drone orthomosaics and scanned historical maps all ship as .tif files with embedded georeferencing. The catch is that double-clicking one opens a photo viewer that either refuses to load it or shows a black rectangle — because photo viewers know nothing about 16-bit elevation bands or geograph...

OpenStreetMap is the largest open geographic database in existence, but “download some of it” is famously non-obvious. The full planet file is over 80 GB, the export tab on openstreetmap.org caps out at a few thousand nodes, and Overpass QL has a learning curve that stops most people at the first curly brace.

What most GIS work actually needs is simpler: the buildings,...

Few things cause quieter data bugs than direction conventions. A surveyor’s field notes, a navigation app, and a Turf.js calculation can all describe the same direction with three different numbers — and if you mix them without converting, everything still runs, it’s just wrong.