Advancing Geospatial Data Curation

Abstract

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