In short an Application Programming Interface is a means to feed applications (apps) with data from a web service. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types.
Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. This process is often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, and can also occur offline. It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result. Crowdsourcing is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.
Source: Wikipedia
A comma-separated values (CSV – also sometimes called character-separated values, because the separator character does not have to be a comma) file stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain-text form. Plain text means that the file is a sequence of characters, with no data that has to be interpreted instead, as binary numbers. A CSV file consists of any number of records, separated by line breaks of some kind; each record consists of fields, separated by some other character or string, most commonly a literal comma or tab. Usually, all records have an identical sequence of fields.
Source: Wikipedia
Also known as georeferencing, this is the process defining location based on place names, coordinates. IP addresses, administrative boundaries, etc. This is a done by matching attributes in your data to a known database. You need to find a service (sometimes paid) to process the information.
Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or ZIP codes (postal codes). With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems, or the coordinates can be embedded into media such as digital photographs via geotagging.
Reverse geocoding is the opposite: finding an associated textual location such as a street address, from geographic coordinates.
A geocoder is a piece of software or a (web) service that helps in this process.
Source: Wikipedia
Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object or occurrence. A Geolocated photo is one that contains location data in its file’s metadata.
Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names.
Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a suitable image search engine. Geotagging-enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources. Geotagging can tell users the location of the content of a given picture or other media or the point of view, and conversely on some media platforms show media relevant to a given location.
Source: Wikipedia
A greenhouse gases (GHG) is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. This process is the fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. In the Solar System, the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Titan also contain gases that cause greenhouse effects. Greenhouse gases greatly affect the temperature of the Earth; without them, Earth’s surface would average about 33 °C (59 °F) colder than the present average of 14 °C (57 °F).
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (taken as the year 1750), the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to a 40% increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, from 280 to 392.6 parts-per-million (ppm) in 2012. This increase has occurred despite the uptake of a large portion of the emissions by various natural “sinks” involved in the carbon cycle. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (i.e., emissions produced by human activities) come from combustion of carbon based fuels, principally wood, coal, oil, and natural gas.
Source: Wikipedia
A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographical information science or geospatial information studies to refer to the academic discipline or career of working with geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of Geoinformatics.[1] In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, and computer science technology.
Source: Wikipedia
A portable or handheld GPS is a device that uses the Global Positioning System to identify location from satellites.
The KML file specifies a set of features (place marks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) for display in Google Earth, Maps and Mobile, or any other geospatial software implementing the KML encoding. Each place always has a longitude and a latitude. Other data can make the view more specific, such as tilt, heading, altitude, which together define a “camera view” along with a timestamp or timespan. KML files are very often distributed in KMZ files, which are zipped KML files with a .kmz extension.
Source: Wikipedia
Map tiles are the 256 by 256 pixel squares that interactive web maps are made of. Each zoom level has its own set of map tiles.
Personal Document File (or PDF) is a file format that provides an electronic image of text or text and graphics that looks like a printed document and can be viewed, printed, and electronically transmitted.
The Project of Monitoring of Amazonia Deforestation (Projeto de Monitoramento do Desflorestamento na Amazônia Legal) is the biggest florest monitoring program in the world.
In raster data the entire area of the map is subdivided into a grid of tiny cells. A value is stored in each of these cells to represent the nature of whatever is present at the corresponding location on the ground.
A shapefile is a digital vector storage format for storing geometric location and associated attribute information. This format lacks the capacity to store topological information. The shapefile format was introduced with ArcView GIS version 2 in the early 1990s. It is now possible to read and write shapefiles using a variety of free and paid programs.
Shapefiles are simple because they store the primitive geometric data types of points, lines, and polygons. They are of limited use without any attributes to specify what they represent. Therefore, a table of records will store properties/attributes for each primitive shape in the shapefile. Shapes (points/lines/polygons) together with data attributes can create infinitely many representations about geographic data. Representation provides the ability for powerful and accurate computations.
Source: Wikipedia
The dimensions represented by each cell or pixel in a raster. For example, in a 30 meter resolution dataset one pixel represents 30 meters of area.
Vector data format spatially describes geometries as either ‘points’, ‘polylines’, or ‘polygons’. These are combined with “attributes” that describe the meaning of the areas. For example, a administrative polygon might have population as an attribute.
The presentation of features on a map in a way that implies relative importance, usually achieved with visual contrast.
