Posts Tagged ‘guo’

Spatial data mining: a discovery or a re-classification of knowledge

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

Guo and Mennis speak on how data information has increased in availability making it difficult to extract the useful data, however I believe that it not just a present day problem. To clarify, although data in many fields may have once been hard to access, some fields have had an over abundance of data for decades. For example, earth related sciences have had a variety of data sets from maps and cross sections to areal photos and digital models since the 1960s, readily available. As such, earth sciences and other spatial fields of study have been data-rich for decades with vast high resolution spatial data sets. This amount of data led to the finding data a problem even before the use of digital databases and indexing.  In light of these issues, the authors may to have not considered earth science database sets when writing or had never really looked at the amount available for earth sciences, but this is just speculation.

I do have to agree, though, that the creation of data mining techniques have made data easier and more accessible to use of none experts and experts alike in many fields, even if there has been high quality spatial data for years. On the topic of fields with pre-existing data, are we then truly discovering new information or are we just re-classifying and changing the format of data to be more accessible elaborating the problem of data retrieval today. The suggestion of a framework to how data should be manipulated, stored and retrieved would solve many issues with pairing old and new data, and retrieving the data one is seeking.

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