Location data

What is location data and why is it different than other data formats? It is quite common to see phrases such as spatial data is special or another more popular adage, 80% of data is geographic. While these are not easily provable, we tend to witness an increased amount of location data. From geotagged images, text, and sensor data, location data is ubiquitous and the world is datafied. In this connected and data-driven driven era, we generate, keep track of, and store huge mounts of data every day. Think of the number of tweets, Instagram images, bank transactions, searches on the web, and routing requests from APIs. We collect more data than at any other period of time in the past, and thus the big data revolution. Many of the datasets collected have an inherent location dimension but are often hidden within the data and not utilized fully.