Advancing Geospatial Data Curation

Abstract

Digital curation is a new term that encompasses ideas from established disciplines: it defines a set of activities to manage and improve the transfer of the increasing volume of data products from producers of digital scientific and academic data to consumers, both now and in the future. Research topics in this new area are in a formative stage, but a variety of work that can serve to advance the curation of digital geospatial data is reviewed and suggested. Active research regarding geospatial data sets investigates the problems of tracking and reporting the data quality and lineage (provenance) of derived data products in geographic information systems, and managing varied geoprocessing workflow. Improving the descriptive semantics of geospatial operations will assist some of these existing areas of research, in particular lineage retrieval for geoprocessing results. Emerging issues in geospatial curation include the long-term preservation of frequently updated streams of geospatial data, and establishing systematic annotation for spatial data collections.