Geographic position refers to the fact that each feature has a location that must be specified in a unique way. To specify the position in an absolute way a coordinate system is used. For small areas, the simplest coordinate system is the regular square grid. For larger areas, certain approved cartographic projections are commonly used. Internationally there are many different coordinate systems in use. This Locational information is provided in maps by using Points, Lines and Polygons.These geometric descriptions are the basic data elements of a map. Thus spatial data describes the absolute and relative location of geographic features.

The coordinate location of a forest would be spatial data, while the characteristics of that forest, e.g. cover group, dominant species, crown closure, height, etc., would be attribute data. Other data types, in particular image and multimedia data, have become more prevalent with changing technology. Depending on the specific content of the data, image data may be considered either spatial, e.g. photographs, animation, movies, etc., or attribute, e.g. sound, descriptions, narration’s, etc.

Generally speaking, spatial data represents the location, size and shape of an object on planet Earth such as a building, lake, mountain or township. Spatial data may also include attributes that provide more information about the entity that is being represented. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or other specialized software applications can be used to access, visualize, manipulate and analyze geospatial data.

A common example of spatial data can be seen in a road map. A road map is a two-dimensional object that contains points, lines, and polygons that can represent cities, roads, and political boundaries such as states or provinces. A road map is a visualization of geographic information. The location of cities, roads, and political boundaries that exist on the surface of the Earth are projected onto a two-dimensional display or piece of paper, preserving the relative positions and relative distances of the rendered objects.

The data that indicates the Earth location (such as longitude and latitude) of these rendered objects is the spatial data. When the map is rendered, this spatial data is used to project the locations of the objects on a two-dimensional piece of paper. A GIS is often used to store, retrieve, and render this Earth-relative spatial data.

Types of spatial data (other than GIS data) that can be stored using Spatial and Graph include data from computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems.

The differences among these systems are in the size and precision of the data, not the data’s complexity. The systems might all involve the same number of data points. On a geographic scale, the location of a bridge can vary by a few tenths of an inch without causing any noticeable problems to the road builders, whereas if the diameter of an engine’s pistons is off by a few tenths of an inch, the engine will not run.

These applications all store, retrieve, update, or query some collection of features that have both nonspatial and spatial attributes. Examples of nonspatial attributes are name, soil_type, landuse_classification, and part_number. The spatial attribute is a coordinate geometry, or vector-based representation of the shape of the feature.

Source(s):

Oracle

TechTarget