Geographic information (cont.)
other characteristics of geographic information are:
often relatively static
natural features and many features of human origin don't
change rapidly
only static information can be portrayed on a static paper
map
can be very voluminous
a terabyte (1012 bytes) of data is sent from a single
satellite in one day
gigabytes (gigabyte = 109 bytes) of data are needed to
describe the US street network