Authors:
Timothy Mulrooney
and
Tysean Wooten
Affiliation:
Department of Environmental, Earth and Geospatial Sciences, North Carolina Central University, 1800 N. Fayetteville Street, Durham, NC, U.S.A.
Keyword(s):
Geographic Information System, Geodatabase Development, Geospatial Standards, Geospatial Metadata, Geospatial Data Development, Food Desert, Food Swamp.
Abstract:
While Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has slowly been integrated into the study of the food environment, little research has been performed to determine the data development needs and standards that best necessitate high-quality research at a high scale. In an era with limited resources such as personnel, bandwidth, space and time, the optimization of these resources in order to understand, visualize and facilitate interventions at an appropriate scale is critical if not necessary. In this research, subject matter experts assessed and evaluated the relative importance of various GIS data themes, attributes and facets of GIS database development in support of local-scale food security analysis. It was found that factors related to the placement of various food sources (grocery stores and farmers markets) and individualized vehicular transportation (roads) outweighed those related to land cover, utilities and zoning, as well as non-vehicular (sidewalks) and public (bus routes) mea
ns of transportation. In addition, when ranking various dimensions of data quality, subject matter experts found positional accuracy and attribute accuracy to be the most important when undertaking the development of a geospatial database of this magnitude.
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