Fri 12 June 2009
Another disastrous consequence of inaccurate spatial information... Not only can you accidentally tag your neighbor as a criminal, now it appears that sloppy spatial data has lead to the wrong house getting demolished.
I've asked it before but its worth repeating ... with all the recent advances in spatial data publishing, where are the advances in metadata and data quality assurance? How do you know where the data comes from, what's been done to it and by whom? What is the intended use of the data? For the vast majority of the data being shoved out onto the web, these bits of metadata are sorely lacking.
Of course this case is more a matter of one person's sheer stupidity; I'm not sure any caveats in the metadata would have stopped the wrecking ball!