Which Is It? Scan or Digitize. Make Up Your Mind!

Although both convey the meaning that an object is being migrated from some physical format to an electronic one, there is a big difference between scanning and digitizing. Digitizing focuses on the creation of a digital version by creating x-y coordinates that define points, lines, and polygons that translates the map into a vector file, whereas scanning, a map renders a digital copy or image of that map as a raster file. The Geographic Information System (GIS) is a tiny but increasing segment of the technology world, and sooner or later the differences in these two terms will be recognized by the wider scientific world, and therefore be reflected in these other resources.