As research in the geosciences and social sciences becomes increasingly dependent on computers, applications such as geographical information systems are becoming indispensable tools. But the digital representations of phenomena that these systems require are often of poor quality, leading to inaccurate results, uncertainty, error propagation, and potentially legal liability. Spatial data quality has become an essential research topic within geographical information science.
This book covers many of the cutting-edge research issues related to spatial data quality, including measurement in GIS and geostatistics, the modeling of spatial objects that have inherent uncertainty, spatial data quality control, quality management, communicating uncertainty and resolution, reasoning and decision-making, visualization of uncertainty and error metadata. Spatial Data Quality will be of interest to anyone undertaking research using GIS and related technologies.