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Efficient Procedures for Quality Assurance of Data and Services

Anders ÖSTMAN, University of Gävle, Sweden; Jan ZAKARIASSON, Swedesurvey, Sweden


Procedures for quality assurance of cartographic map production processes have been developed and utilized for several decades. The aim of these procedures is to assure proper use of map products, mainly map reading and basic measurements of distances, directions and areas. Other usages of geospatial information are also available with the increasing use of GIS. As a consequence, ISO has specified a set of data quality elements such as geometric and temporal accuracy, completeness, logical consistency, etc. to be applied in data quality assessment. Since the launch of the INSPIRE initiative in 2001, increased attention has been paid to the development of network services, in particular to download and discovery services. There is a consensus within the IT industry that IT services should be fast, provide correct information, flexible, provided at low cost, convenient and reliable. The implementing rules of the INSPIRE network services also specifies some elements related to service quality, such as uptime, response time and loading requirements. Successful management of data and services requires that efficient procedures for assuring the quality of data and services are established. This paper describes two examples of such quality assurance routines, one related to data migration and the other one related to the provision of INSPIRE compliant network services. Data migration means that data are moved from one environment to another. For example, it might be transformation of old data in MS-DOS systems to modern databases, or transformation of data from one database to another. The quality assurance techniques applied depend on the domains of the source and target data and are often based on statistics and sampling techniques. Proper testing of data migration routines are also important. Quality assurance of service provisioning requires constant monitoring of performance of servers, networks, etc. as well as compliance testing of the information provided by the services. In addition, usability tests are necessary in order to assure the services are flexible and convenient.



Keywords: Quality assurance, geographic information, services, INSPIRE

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