Uncertainty of spatial information and spatial analysis

Abstract

Uncertainty of spatial information and spatial analysis is one of the most essential and fundamental issues in geographical information science, and spatial data quality plays a critical role in geographical applications and decision-making. This chapter adopts a bibliometric quantitative analysis to study the history of international development in this field, to study the state and evolution of hot issues, and to analyse the position of China in this field as well as the contribution of NSFC with respect to gross, process and source. The result shows that the research of Chinese scholars in this field is overall top-ranked worldwide. However, there exists a gap of high-influence achievement in this field between our country and international developed countries. Therefore, further efforts should be made to strength the fundamental researches on uncertainty and trust in spatial information and to associate with the strategic requirements of national development.