Interoperable GIS Operations: A Quality Aware Perspective

Facilitating an interoperable application environment based on heterogeneous georesources is one of the ultimate goals for a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). As the sharing of geospatial data becomes increasingly easy and convenient, the discrepancy and heterogeneity of data quality between datasets dynamically collected from various georesources must be taken into consideration. Such awareness of data quality must extend to the design of geographic information system (GIS) operations, which are often naively used to analyze and derive new information. This paper proposes a quality-aware approach for incorporating standardized quality information into the design of GIS operations to ensure that the necessary quality information is always evaluated in a map interface for correct interpretation. Since the proposed approach can greatly reduce user effort when dealing with unfamiliar datasets, it should be seamlessly integrated with current sharing frameworks based on geospatial web services to facilitate user-friendly and interoperable geospatial applications.