Importing flat data

Loading flat data may seem to be a bit dull initially but it is important to understand that many popular and interesting datasets often contain the spatial information in very different formats, such as:

• Coordinates expressed in Lon/Lat or projected coordinates
• Encoded geometry, for example WKT, TopoJSON, GeoJSON
• Location in the form of an address
• Location in non-cartesian coordinates, for example start point, angle and direction
• While the earlier examples indicate the data would require further processing in order to extract the spatial content into a usable form, clearly ability to import flat datasets should not be underestimated