Why "Geospatial" or "Geographic" Database?

[roselin@#5673]

Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) Management: They understand and manage different CRSs (e.g., WGS84 for GPS coordinates, UTM for projected coordinates), enabling data from various sources to be integrated and analyzed correctly. This includes functionalities for transforming data between different CRSs.

The terms Geospatial Database and Geographic Database are perhaps the most common and accurate synonyms for spatial database, particularly when the data relates to the Earth's surface.

Geo- (prefix): Directly refers to the Earth or geography.
Spatial: Pertains to space and location in a broader sense, not exclusively Earth-bound.
While "spatial" can refer to any N-dimensional space (e.g., CAD data for architectural special database designs, 3D models in engineering), "geospatial" and "geographic" explicitly emphasize that the data is anchored to a location on Earth, using latitude, longitude, elevation, and often a specific projection. Most practical applications of spatial databases deal with Earth-referenced data, hence the frequent interchangeability of these terms. They are fundamental to Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

GIS Database
The term GIS Database is often used because spatial databases are the foundational data storage component for Geographic Information Systems. A GIS is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data. The database provides the robust backend for the GIS software's analytical and mapping capabilities. While "GIS database" clearly conveys the application domain, it might be slightly less precise regarding the technical capabilities of the database itself, as some might infer it solely refers to data used by a GIS rather than a database engineered with spatial features.