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Legacy databases and GIS: a discussion of the issues illustrated by a case study of archaeological site data from southeast Alberta, Canada
Author(s) -
WOYWITKA ROBIN,
BEAUDOIN ALWYNNE B.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the canadian geographer / le géographe canadien
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.35
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1541-0064
pISSN - 0008-3658
DOI - 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2009.00282.x
Subject(s) - database , work (physics) , data quality , geographic information system , archaeology , geography , computer science , data science , environmental resource management , cartography , engineering , operations management , environmental science , mechanical engineering , metric (unit)
Many institutions and agencies are currently faced with the issue of geographic information systems‐enabling legacy databases. The problems can be acute for data sets that have been compiled through many years, using different standards and levels of recording. To explore these issues further, we report on a data quality assessment undertaken in 2002 for a subset of the archaeological site database of the province of Alberta, Canada. Our work shows that positional ambiguities in the data set can be highlighted and corrected by relatively straightforward procedures. This case study also provides an indication of the amount of work effort that will be involved in validating or ‘cleaning up’ data sets so model results and analyses undertaken with them are more reliable .