5.3. Data Production and Management

5.3. Data Production and Management

Ideally, a fully-featured mapping tool should offer the possibility of creating data within the tool, exporting and importing data in a number of formats, validating created and imported data, and providing the option to modify data.

As discussed in detail in section 4.1.1, Fusion Tables accepts data in a number of formats, including simple texts and spreadsheets, comma-separated texts, keyhole markup language format etc. However, the data tables need to be imported to start with. After importing, Fusion Tables offers a number of useful data manipulation tasks. For example, a number of tables can be merged together; new tables can be created selecting a number of columns etc. Entries of such tables can be edited with ease. In perspective of mapping language data, Google Fusion Tables offers the nice feature of automatically geocoding the location data. Therefore, locations can be put in as simple texts or addresses, without the necessity of providing the correct geo-coordinates in latitudes and longitudes. Fusion Tables is quite friendly in terms of error handling and correcting wrongly geo-coded data.

Like Fusion Tables, LL-MAP also requires the initial map data to be imported from files. Depending on the type of presentation, map data can come in a number of different formats, e.g. spreadsheets, shape files, keyhole markup language format etc. Keeping to the limitations of the investigation done in the example presented above, the management of uploaded data in LL-MAP is found to be more difficult compared to Fusion Tables. For example, individual entries cannot be edited, different sets of data, like spreadsheets, cannot be combined for a particular layer. The consistency of data is not always maintained. For example, uploading the same data file more than once does not detect the name conflict. This also makes error handling difficult for uploaded data. Another shortcoming is that LL-MAP does not automatically convert location names into geo-coordinates. Therefore, the location data must be provided as a combination of latitudes and longitudes.

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Easily create Help documents