THE ERROR COMPONENT IN SPATIAL DATA BACKGROUND: ERROR AND DATA QUALITY DEFINITIONS

No map can be picked apart into completely independent pellets of information. There is something collective and comprehensive about the spatial representation. First, the map is spatially continuous and comiected. There is also a deeper reason. Individual facts become more useful i nformation through an interaction with a structure of theory that provides a context to interpret the individual facts. In common usage, the main distinction between data and information arises from meaning, but meaning is context dependent. To be more concrete, the process of converting a particular fact into information must comprehend the fitness of that fact for some particular purpose. This line of argument provides an important introduction to the role of data quality in an information system. Quality has various definitions in industria