Visual Access to Data Quality in Geographic Information Systems

Abstract

Visualization encompasses the display of quantities or qualities of visible or invisible phenomena through the combined use of points, lines, a coordinate system, numbers, symbols, words, shading, color, and animation. The objectives of visualization are to provoke insights and expand comprehension of information by revealing complex relationships among data. Geographical information is visualized in the form of maps. Recent concern over the accuracy and reliability of spatial information in geographic information systems has raised an interest in applying visualization tools to comprehend and communicate the reliability of GIS information and products. This paper develops design requirements for visualization of spatial data quality based on characterizations of quality, a range of quality assessment tasks, and different contexts under which data quality might be investigated.

Visualisation of spatial data quality for internet and mobile GIS applications

“…This differs from mobile GIS, and therefore these GIS applications require different graph design and implementation strategies, whilst the basic data model design remains similar. Beard and Mackaness (1993) proposed that design of visual techniques should consider issues of scale, spatial and temporal characteristics, local variations, and computational efficiency. In addition to these requirements, for mobile GIS, the following characteristics need to be considered:…”

“…Beard and Mackaness (1993) classified three data levels: discrete, for individual features; localised, applying to a local spatial neighbourhood; and global, for an entire data set. They suggest that the measurements of each data quality component could be nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio, (Table 1).…”

Study on Modeling and Visualizing the Positional Uncertainty of Remote Sensing Image

“…So it is important to explore the methods of representing the positioning uncertainty of remotely sensed imagery, and the information about data quality should be provided to users along with the data. Visualization has often been approved to be an intuitive and effective way for quality communication especially useful for geospatial data (Beard & Mackaness, 1993. In the last two decades, visualization prototypes have been proposed, which focus on presentation and exploration of uncertainty in a remotely sensed image classification (Van Der Wel, et al, 1997, Blenkinsop, et al, 2000, Lucieer & Kraak, 2004.…”

Mapping and the Citizen Sensor

“…Fortunately, the dual role of visualisation as a communication and as an exploration tool (DiBiase et al, 1992) can serve all VGI user needs. The idea of levels of uncertainty visualisation in relation to the experience and needs of the user is discussed in Beard and Mackaness (1993). Three levels are distinguished: the first level is simply a notification of poor data quality, with 'poor' defined on the basis of a predetermined threshold; the second level adds detail, such as the location and type of quality conflict, etc.…”