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Viewing report
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Exposing Uncertainty. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Nov 2008, Pages: 204
How are consumers determining whether spatial data is
suitable for them? Today, the Internet provides
access to plenty of mapping data of varying quality.
To date, literature and industry conventions have
both assumed that finding data which is fit for a
given purpose, predominantly involves reading
standardized data about the data (or ‘metadata’).
Metadata has to be written by the data provider and
relentlessly updated as the data changes. This
approach presumably made sense in 1983, before the
Internet and Google were household terms, but where
is the empirical evidence of potential consumers
using metadata today? This thesis explores
consumers’ experiences and argues that, for the
typical spatial data consumer, data quality metadata
plays virtually no role in determining whether a
dataset is suitable or good enough for their use.
Instead, their goals are to (1) try to find an
understandable description of the data content and
then (2) use the dataset to form their own opinion of
its reliability. Therefore, to communicate fitness
for use, data providers need to focus on including
quality as part of the data description or implicitly
portray quality as part of data use.
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