One strategy suggested by Elwood is that “enriching data with information will help the user assess heterogeneity” although to me this does not seem to assist with solving or managing the problem of data heterogeneity. It has been mentioned in class that data is not typically well documented in GIS and that one way to provide information about it is to create metadata. In the world of the internet where massive amounts of data now have spatial references, and in many cases change rapidly, it is not practical to try to provide more information about every piece of data to try to reduce heterogeneity and standardize the data. Since additional data about data would provide even more information to sift through, this also seems rather counterintuitive. While I recognize there is heterogeneity in data, I do not understand the use of assessing heterogeneity but see instead much more use in actually working with heterogeneous data and focusing more time and effort in promoting methods to do this such as in particular contexts as mentioned by Elwood.
-Outdoor Addict