Quality of Spatial Data
Open Data and Big Data are growing. Every day more open spatial data sets are made available. The very criterion to use or not use any data set is data quality. We define quality as: Fitness for Use. In other words: does the data serve the needs of the user? The quality of data becomes more important every day. Wageningen Environmental Research helps to assess that quality and to select the right data set for the user's needs.
Describing quality
Descriptions of data quality are often hard to find and difficult to understand for end users. Quality characteristics, described by data makers in meta datasets in technical terms, usually are not easy to comprehend. For producers of open data it is admittedly difficult to determine who their users will be, what their needs are, and how the description of the data quality could reflect that. Data should be "fit for use", but often the nature of the uses is not clear.
ECQSD at Wageningen Environmental Research
At Wageningen Environmental Research, the Expertise Centre for Quality of Spatial Data offers knowledge, tooling and solutions to help get a grip on the complexity of the matter. A framework has been constructed question users in a simple way with regard to data quality. Also, workshops have been developed. ECQSD executes projects (e.g. audits) related to the quality of spatial data made by data producers. ECQSD has many contacts and co-operation with partners is ongoing.