Facts or fiction: Consumer beliefs about spatial data quality
As more and more spatial datasets become publicly available, the every day data consumer is increasingly likely to obtain data over the internet. While search engines exist and regulated metadata is available online, there has been little research into how consumers choose a dataset to use and how these web pages reflect their needs. Moreover, there is an underlying assumption that users want to know measures of internal quality while choosing data.
This research uses interviews and feedback emails to document the way users naturally go about selecting datasets. Interviews are fairly unstructured and ask participants how and why they choose spatial data both in specific incidences that they personally recall and generally. Participants are from varied, non-GIS backgrounds such as architecture, planning and environmental surveying.
Findings show that consumers are more interested in determining the content of a dataset and may decide data is unsuitable if the web interface is too confusing to provide this information clearly. Alternatively, they may rely exclusively on opinions of people around them and unquestioningly procure data through the web without viewing the auxiliary information. Internal quality may be important to them once they have had a chance to interact with the data. That is, they become curious when the data does not match with the real world or another dataset.
These results will influence the way spatial datasets could be presented on the internet and thus make data more accessible, understandable, and potentially more valuable to the everyday person looking for meaningful, reliable information.