AAA land information: accurate, assured and authoritative
Williamson, Ian, Abbas Rajabifard et al.
Online spatial data1 are being widely used by citizens, government and the private sector in a variety of applications and domains such as business, navigation, properties/parcels and street addresses. Public and private businesses often assume online spatial data are just maps and these maps are accurate. They do not appreciate how and by whom this spatial data are created, collected, maintained and updated. In the past this has not been a critical issue since spatial data have generally been produced and updated by authoritative government agencies. This landscape is changing dramatically with the introduction of crowd sourced and volunteered geographic information (VGI) whereby members of the public or wider society can collect and contribute to collections of spatial data. This VGI phenomenon enabled a wealth of free spatial information such as street address, land parcels/properties and road networks to be created and maintained by an untrained public at various levels of integrity and accuracy. As a result, companies (e.g. Google) that maintain online maps, tend to use free crowd sourced spatial data instead of authoritative sources of spatial data. Government and particularly land administration agencies such as by the Public Sector Mapping Agencies of Australia usually produce authoritative spatial data however they are commercially expensive, reflecting the efforts needed for their construction, maintenance and further development.
Event: 8th FIG Regional Conference 2012 Surveying Towards Sustainable Development
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