Spatial data refers to anything that needs to be localized on the Earth. From points to localize a person or a point of interest on the Earth surface, to lines to model a street or a river path, and to areas to delimit countries and buildings, all of these geometries are spatial data. They have been harmonized within Geographic Information System (GIS), which provides a unified approach for representing these objects. In this chapter, we will discover the shapefile and GeoJSON formats. The full power of these systems is their ability to compute metrics based on these geometries with ease: getting a line length, a surface area, or computing the distance between objects.

While spatial data has always been important in the field of cartography, it has attracted more and more interest with the development of smartphones that are equipped with GPS sensors and are able...