Geospatial data is data about places on the earth: where roads, buildings, shops, pipes, fields and customers are. Location is the one kind of data that almost every other kind is joined to. An order, a customer, a mobile tower and a flood all happen somewhere. The software that stores and analyses this data by place is called a geographic information system, or GIS.
Take an online store in Bengaluru that sells home appliances. Every order it takes has an address. Every delivery follows a route. And when the store decides to open its first showroom, the first question is simple: where are our customers? Here is how one order meets the map, and how all the orders together shape the store's plans.
First, the address becomes a point. A customer in Whitefield types "Flat 302, behind the Ganesha temple, near the water tank". Many Indian addresses are written like this. So the store first cleans the address with data quality software. Then a digital map turns it into a latitude and a longitude. This step is called geocoding.
Second, the delivery is planned. Route optimisation software uses the map's roads and usual travel times to put the order on a van's route for the next morning.
Third, the orders are studied by place. Every night, the store copies its orders into its data warehouse. An analyst loads them into a geographic information system (GIS), which draws every order as a point on the map and counts the orders in each pin code. The map shows that 30% of air-conditioner orders come from a few eastern suburbs.
Fourth, a site is chosen. Location intelligence adds what the store's own data cannot show: which shops already stand on each street, how many people pass by, and what nearby households spend. It ranks three streets for the showroom.
Fifth, the ground is checked from above. Before the store leases a plot for a warehouse behind the showroom, it has the plot surveyed. Drone surveying turns photographs taken from a drone into an exact plan of the plot, its slopes and its access road. In the United States, a related business photographs whole cities from aircraft. Aerial roof measurement sells the size and damage of each roof to insurers and roofers there.
A map is two things at once. It is a dataset, gathered from satellites, aircraft, cars and surveyors. Roads, buildings and shops keep changing, so the dataset must be updated all the time. It is sold on subscription, like other data as a service. A map is also software, the GIS, which lets a company ask questions of its own data by place: where is our mobile network weakest, or how far will the flood reach? More and more of the updating is now done by geospatial AI, AI models that read images from cars, drones, aircraft and earth observation satellites.