Geographical feature in the context of Geographic information system

A body of water or waterbody is any significant accumulation of water on the surface of Earth or another planet. The term most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more rarely, puddles. A body of water does not have to be still or contained; rivers, streams, canals, and other geographical features where water moves from one place to another are also considered bodies of water.

Most are naturally occurring and massive geographical features, but some are artificial. There are types that can be either. For example, most reservoirs are created by engineering dams, but some natural lakes are used as reservoirs. Similarly, most harbors are naturally occurring bays, but some harbors have been created through construction.

A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity (location or object). It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the geocode is a human-readable and short identifier.

Typical geocodes (in bold) and entities represented by it:

Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms (names of places, also known as place names and geographical names), including their origins, meanings, usage, and types. Toponym is the general term for the name of any geographical feature, and the full scope of the term also includes names of all cosmographical features.

In a more specific sense, the term toponymy refers to an inventory of toponyms, while the discipline researching such names is referred to as toponymics or toponomastics. Toponymy is a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds. A person who studies toponymy is called toponymist.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a map database maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial photo imagery or satellite imagery, and import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and is commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, and assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own data model to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine, and editor.

OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in response to the Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, failing to release its data to the public under free licences in 2004. Initially, maps in OSM were created only via GPS traces, but it was quickly populated by importing public domain geographical data such as the U.S. TIGER and by tracing imagery as permitted by source. OpenStreetMap's adoption was accelerated by the development of supporting software and applications and Google Maps' 2012 introduction of pricing.

Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates (typically the latitude/longitude pair) to identify a location on the Earth's surface. Reverse geocoding on the other hand converts geographic coordinates to the description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.

• Geocode (verb): provide geographical coordinates corresponding to (a location).
• Geocode (noun): is a code that represents a geographic entity (location or object).
  In general is a human-readable and short identifier; like a nominal-geocode as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, or a grid-geocode, as Geohash geocode.
• Geocoder (noun): a piece of software or a (web) service that implements a geocoding process i.e. a set of interrelated components in the form of operations, algorithms, and data sources that work together to produce a spatial representation for descriptive locational references.

The geographic coordinates representing locations often vary greatly in positional accuracy. Examples include building centroids, land parcel centroids, interpolated locations based on thoroughfare ranges, street segments centroids, postal code centroids (e.g. ZIP codes, CEDEX), and administrative division Centroids.