Field data collection with mobile GIS: Dependencies between semantics and data quality
Field work is needed in many scientific disciplines as well as practice e.g., surveying or environmental monitoring. Despite the goal of making the data collection process more effective, mobile geocomputing tools are a means to control data quality during data collection. Such tools must consider the conceptual data models of real world features that are developed in specific spatial information communities. Mobile GIS tools can support data quality through functions that control simultaneously the data entered by field workers. Semantic integrity of the database can be achieved through semantic plausibility controls, i.e., rules implemented in a knowledge base that help avoid the occurrence of inconsistencies. Such knowledge based functions must take into account the dependencies that exist between data quality and data semantics. Exemplarily, such dependencies are described in this paper as well as the knowledge based functions that are integrated as Dynamic Link Libraries into a mobile GIS. The examples demonstrate the strong application dependency of data quality and raise the question of how to integrate information about specific quality requirements into data models, e.g., for the purpose of multiple data use. The use of data modeling languages to achieve comprehensive data quality descriptions that consider adequately the dependencies between data quality and semantics is proposed and some hints on potentially useful linkages with other techniques to describe data and their semantics are given.
mobile gis semantics data quality