I realize this is a sort of a subjective question, but I've seen other subjective questions on the site, so I thought it I'd put it out there.
A colleague recently had a request for "geospatial data" with a grant that they were submitting, and were confused by exactly what was being asked for. My explanation was that they were asking for any GIS data related to the project area. My explanation seemed to work, but I wanted to put it to the community at large for a more defined definition.
How would you define "geospatial data" to a non-GIS professional?
Best Answer
Geospatial, geographic and spatial are used interchangeably to mean data with a spatial component, probably on the surface of the earth. The reasoning behind the portmanteau geospatial is that spatial alone is too generic: any three dimensional space qualifies, and geographic is too specific: you could use the same methods for manipulating martian data. Geospatial was born as a compromise.
In this case, it means any data which has an explicitly geographic component, ranging from vector and raster data to tabular data with site locations.