EuroGeographics - Antti Jakobsson

'Reality Check'

Abstract:
Quality can be defined as fitness for use, including both quality of design, conformance to the design (production oriented quality), customer satisfaction and the fulfilment of the needs of society or environment.

Current interoperability and the SDI programmes have not clearly identified quality as a major issue. Most of the efforts concentrate on solving interoperability issues at data or system level, ignoring organizational issues. Quality is often regarded as one of the metadata labels, which can be addressed by reporting it to the users. However, if users wish to combine multiple sources, quality has a major role. We may consider that geographic information production and processing are getting into the era, when information can be exchanged and combined very easily. Therefore, the quality management of geographic information could naturally be assumed to play a more important role in the near future.

Antti Jakobsson - Biography:
Dr. Antti Jakobsson is a programme manager in EuroGeographics. He has been a chairman of the Expert Group on Quality in EuroGeographics since 2001.  Preciously he was a chief engineer in the Development Centre of the National Land Survey of Finland (NLS), where he duties included development of national mapping, spatial data infrastructure development and quality management. His doctoral thesis is related to quality and he has participated in the development of ISO 19113, ISO 19114 and ISO 19138. He has given lectures on data quality in the Technical University of Helsinki. He is the chairman of the Cartographic Society of Finland.