A methodology for definition and usage of spatial data quality rules

摘要

Geospatial data are being increasingly produced, shared, and analyzed in GIS community, and data users are always interested in "good" quality data, which means "fitness for use". However, the complex peculiarities of geographic data bring many difficulties for providing such good quality data according to users' requirements or a product specification. The diverse data quality demands of different users or specifications need to be clearly stated and described, in order that data quality information can be easily applied to data involved activities, such as data capture, data process and data integration. In GI Science, a widely used means for representing quality information is to adopt constraints or rules, for example, spatial integrity constraints are used to deal with spatial relations of geographic entities and also containing semantic information. In order to handle data quality rules, extensive spatial data quality elements need to be investigated. In this paper, international standards relating to spatial data quality are emphasized for studying detailed quality elements. Moreover, a methodology for representing data quality rules in a logical way is given, and various examples corresponding to different data quality elements are used to demonstrate its usages.