Chapter 2 1) Introduction

Geodata, or geospatial data, refers to features associated with a specific location on the Earth’s surface. This data can be in various forms and is often used in geographic information systems (GIS) for mapping and analysis.

The two key components characterizing geodata are spatial identifier and attributes. Spatial identifier specifies the location and shape of the features, with different levels of detail, while attributes describe their characteristics.

The two basic formats used to represent the spatial component of geodata:

1. Vector: this format uses points, lines, and polygons to identify each individual features.

2. Raster: this format uses a regular grid of pixels to represent the global geographic context.

In addition, attribute tables are used to store the characteristics associated with the geospatial features.

Software named GIS are specifically designed to help users to edit, manage, analyze, and map geodata. To make working with geodata easier, several packages have been developed in R. These packages allow users to handle geodata directly in R computing environment, without needing separate GIS software.

In this chapter, we introduce the basic functions of these R packages and demonstrate how to use them to work with geodata in the pre-processing and post-processing phase of a pipeline in geomodeling.