How Important is Geospatial Data to You?

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry currently teaches students how to manipulate text (using regular expressions), XML (using DOM), relational data (with SQL), and binary data. A decade ago, when we first put the course together, that covered everything I'd ever seen more than one or two scientists use. Today, though, an increasing number are using geospatial (map) data as well. How important is this to your work? If the answer is "very", what data do you work with, what do you do with it, and what would you like to be able to do?