Geospatial information utility: an estimation of the relevance of geospatial information to users

As the acquisition and use of information are costly, the optimal use of information involves economic tradeoffs. Therefore, valuing information is attracting research and thought. However, till now, little attention has been paid to the geospatial information domain, which is increasingly coming to the attention of decision makers seeking to improve decision models by considering spatio-temporal factors. This paper proposes a metric called Geospatial Information Utility (GeoIU), which will allow decision makers to assess the degree of utility of accessed geospatial data sets when making decisions that incorporate those geospatial data and information. The GeoIU metric uses multi-attribute utility theory to assess, score, and weight metadata queries run against geospatial data and information discovered in distributed sources. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.