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Secondary Data
Secondary Data
• The spatial data which is not actually acquired by the analyst himself,
and which has been collected and published by other parties are
called secondary data. Or, the data obtained by using the most
common source of secondary data is scanned hard copy map
• Not all the time it is possible to visit the field for collection of data or
invest large scale of budget on spatial data acquisition by direct
procedure such as remote sensing and GPS.
• The data collected contains some amount of error, which further gets
propagated when maps are prepared from it.
• Finally, the error gets cumulated when the user scans the published
map and digitizes it.
• The other reason for keeping secondary data at lower priority for
precise data sources is unverified data sources and unsure data
quality as user himself is not involved in its acquisition.
• Common sources Secondary Data
• Existing paper maps
• Clearinghouse and geoportals
Clearinghouse and Geoportal
• Clearinghouse is the one of the easy way of acquiring spatial data
where the user can get the required data from some website, which
takes data from one who actually own the data and provide it to the
party willing to use it.
• The advent of internet has made sharing data easily, and it has
facilitated spatial data sharing too.
• The clearing house gives information of the data that can be made
available to the user.
• When user completes the process, the clearing house fetches the
spatial data from the remote database owned by the original data
source owned by data collector and provides it to user.
• Before the user actually orders data, on query, the clearing house
provides information about characteristics of the data. This data of
data is called metadata.