Advancing Geospatial Data Curation
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Date
2006Author
Bose, Rajendra
Reitsma, Femke
Metadata
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.