New Tools for Handeling Spatial Data Quality: Moving from Academic Concepts to Practical Reality

New Tools for Handling Spatial Data Quality: Moving from Academic Concepts to Practical Reality
(1999 Horwood Critique Prize)

Abstract: While the growth in spatial data quality research has increased dramatically during the past decade in response to user needs, many of the concepts developed have yet to come to fruition in the form of usable tools that can be readily applied in practice using commercial GIS packages. As such, the purpose of this paper is to report on some of the tools becoming available for implementation by users of spatial data that have been developed by the author and his colleagues over the past few years. The examples presented cover: (1) the tracking of feature coordinate edits and their reporting in visual data quality statements; (2) testing and reporting the positional accuracy of linear features of unknown lineage; (3) simulating uncertainty in products derived from Digital Elevation Models; (4) incorporating uncertainty modeling in vector point, line and polygon files, and (5) reporting data quality information at different levels of database structure. In several of these cases, public domain software already exists on the Internet for application by GIS users, which serves to demonstrate that data quality research is indeed moving from academic concepts to practical reality.