Model of Error Propagating in Topology Clean Operation

Data quality in GIS has been widely recognized as one of the most critical issues in GIS applications in recent years. There are numerous effective error models for managing error propagation in the process of data manipulation and analysis. But there is still a lack of error analysis and its propagation in topological operations. In practical applications, data sources, which have different accuracy of spatial data, will be a necessity of causing inconsistency of topological relations. So this paper analyses topological inconsistency of inaccurate data, and compares their differences of different processing methods. Then, an error propagation model is built, as is easy for users to analyze and understand the effect of error in GIS operations. Finally, a detailed example illustrates its application of the model built in this paper.