Geographic Information Quality Control
Control is an activity the aim of which is to regulate and correct any activities in order to ensure their efficiency and effectiveness. It is also a final, and always needed, stage in a production cycle which enables comparison of the performance with a pattern, and, from the one side, making immediate correction decisions, from the other drawing conclusions for the future.
Control is not only the instrument for detecting shortages, but it also plays a crucial role in the optimisation of tasks, i.e. decrease of production costs, improvement of production quality, and shortening of product production time.
Production control system in new technologies which are being already implemented requires that more attention be paid to the second of these elements, i.e. the optimisation of production process with a simultaneous verification of newly made patterns. Such attitude makes it possible not only to keep appropriate quality of a product, but also plays a crucial role in the improvement process of the already binding instructions, and thus new technology.
The role of a control system in a company is substantially changing. It changes its position from the one of an opponent of a performer to their ally by defending them against unnecessary rules, non-binding regulations, and the patterns which hamper their progress. This new role requires from a control system as critical view on a product as on a ”pattern”, that is in the case of geographic information in relation to the instruction and technical conditions.
There are many reasons why it is important to ensure data quality standards. The main of them include:
- interoperationality of a set of data
- implementation SDI
- INSPIRE requirements
- requirements of clients
- The most important elements having influence on the quality of data include:
- origin – as regards source materials, methods of gathering and processing that a database has been put through
- location precision – as regards the precision in pointing spatial elements
- attributes’ precision – as regards the precision of thematic elements
- logical compliance – as regards faithfulness of the existing database connections.
- completeness – as regards the correspondence between the reality and its projection in a database.
Quality evaluation of groups of data must be based on concise and clearly stated procedures. Such procedures make it possible for suppliers to determine the compatibility of their product with the criteria defined in technical specification, and for users to define a scope within which the groups of data comply with their requirements.
Quality / Quality Control Procedures are treated by GeoInvent as a crucial element of the services offered by the company.
QA/QC procedures used in GeoInvent are in compliance with the currently binding Geographic Information Quality Standards ISO 1910-0 specified below:
ISO 19113 Geographic Information – Quality Principles. The aim of this standard is to introduce the rules of geographic data quality description, determining elements of quality reporting, and organisation of data quality information.
ISO 19114 Geographic Information - Quality Evaluation Procedures. The aim of this standard is to ensure a general structure for procedures used to determine and evaluate the quality of the groups of geographic data, as well as the general rules of evaluation and creation of data quality reports as a part of metadata or as data quality report.
ISO 19138 Geographic Information – Data Quality Measure. The standard defines a group of data quality elements which may be used while creating data quality reports for the components in ISO19113.
ISO 19115 Geographic Information - Metadata. This standard defines general meta-data for digital geographic data and it provides a structure for describing all the metadata included in ISO19100 standards.
ISO 19131 Geographic Information – Data Product Specification. The aim of the standard is to help the producers of product specification within the scope of Geographic Information in such a design of a database structure so that they are in compliance with other standards within the scope of Geographic Information.
ISO 14825 Intelligent Transportation Systems – Geographic Data Files. General specification of data. The standard describes a conceptual and logical model of data, as well as data exchange format between geographic databases used in the application software of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It describes the specification of potential contents of such a database (elements, attributes and relations), the specification of the elements’ representation mode, and the way of creating information describing a database (metadata).