Data Preparation

Initial Exploration

Commercial and open-source geographic information system tools (GIS) can be used to explore and transform the initial spatial datasets.

Source: Nate's QGIS Tutorial

Formats

Datasets are be available in various file formats. To maintain workflow and archival consistency, conversion to the following standardized formats is recommended:

Vector Data

Shapefile

GeoJSON

KML

Raster Data

GeoTIFF

Categorical / Numerical Data

CSV

JSON

Tiles

MBTiles

Command-Line Utilities

The following utilities are critical for a spatial visualization workflow, assisting with programmatic operations on geospatial raster and vector datasets.

• GDAL Utilities. Geospatial Data Abstraction Library is a translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats
• GDAL ogr2ogr. Converts simple features data between file formats.
• Osmosis, osmconvert, and osmfilter. Tools to process, convert, and filter files in the Open Street Map (OSM) data format.
• jq. A popular command-line JSON processor to work with files in the GeoJSON data format.