In geomatics, digitalization is the transfer of entities (points, lines, polygons) from physical media (for example, photographs, plans, maps on paper) to digital files in vector format. Digitalization also consists in associating attribute data to these entities. Historically, digitizing was done by tracing entities using a digitizing tablet connected to a computer which provided support. Now the media is scanned and digitization is done directly on the screen. The tools used for digitizing can be more or less complex depending on the nature of the objects, the management of topology (their connection or contiguity), or other variously specific input methods.
[French: Digitalisation]