Digital data literacy in an economic world: Geo-spatial data literacy aspects

Abstract

Data literacy is an essential skill for today’s digital way of life, to be able to judge the reliability of different data presented, for instance in news and media or in business processes. Geo-Spatial data are a specific kind of data and influence most of our daily decisions. In school one learns how to critically read and reflect texts and literature. So one is literate in the case of textual data. For other data, and especially geo-spatial data, one seems to be less skilled. This contribution is supposed to open one’s eyes to understand the origin of geo-spatial data sets, their specific nature and how to gain geo-spatial data sets with specific focus on economic applications. In addition to that, how the selection of geo-spatial data and the processing of geo-spatial data can influence the decision-making of people in thematic fields such as economy and business is discussed. The overall goal is to make people of disciplines other than those that are geo-related aware of the characteristics and possible ways of manipulation of maps and geo-spatial products as well as of the power of geo-spatial data and map products in their specific thematic field of operation.