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.

• In such case, use of secondary data comes ahead as an attractive

alternative. Why not use the data someone has already acquired and
published, if it comes to be economic and provides acceptable level of
accuracy.
• Unless primary sources are available and lower accuracy may be
acceptable, the secondary data is less preferred to primary source.
The reason behind this is the propagation of error.

• 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.

• Thus, clearinghouse is the intermediate party or the online platform

between data producer and data user, that takes spatial data from the
producer and provide it to the user.
3.2 Data Entry and Preparation
Especially when GIS uses hard copy products as input for GIS, some
steps are required to be performed before we actually become able to
use the data. Those activities are termed data preparation and entry.

Following are the main activities included in it:

• Scanning
• Georeferencing
• Digitization
Scanning
• It is the process of converting the hard copy output to a digital softcopy
image. The scanning process is carried out using scanner, which consists of
small CCD arrays to record data and a glass base to place hard copy image
over it.

"Charged Coupled Device."

• Operationally, when the hard copy map to be scanned is placed over
glass cover of the scanner and command is given to scanner, it causes
the CCD arrays to emit light, which is sent to glass cover and then
reflected by the image placed on it. The image reflects the light back
to the CCD array, the intensity of which depends on the nature of
content of that particular pixel on image. Reflected light when
reaches to the CCD array, it is stored as a series of values stored in
row and column. This type of representation is raster representation
of the scanned image.
• On carrying out scanning, different modes of scanning are offered by
scanners. The followings are the three modes on scanning image:
• Black and White Scanning
• Grayscale scanning
• Color Scanning
• Black and white:
• This mode of scanning detects the objects as either purely black or purely
white. Intermediate colors or intermediate grayscale levels are not supported
by it. That means the cell value is either 0 representing black or 1
representing completely white. As this offers only two levels of values(21 ), it
is called 2-bit scanning. This mode may be suitable for scanning single color
maps such as cadastral maps

The choice of the mode of scanning depends on the type of

input and purpose for which it is being scanned
• Grayscale scanning:
• Sometimes when the map does not contain different color but the variation
of darkness of a single color, grayscale scanning comes ahead as the most
suitable mode of scanning. In this type of scanning, each pixel stores
• values of a single color within a range. The visual range is determined by the
no. of bits of image.
• For an example, a 8 bit grayscale image can store 28 = 256 different levels. So,
value stored by each pixel ranges between 0 representing completely dark to
255 representing completely bright or white.
• So, the image with higher no. of bits can show even smaller variation in
intensity, but at the same time increases data volume.
• Color scanning:
• Unlike previous modes which contain only single band, color scanner scan
image in three different bands, each band storing the value of each pixel in
particular band.
• The overall visual appearance of the image is then formed by the combination
of the amount of red, green and blue color in that particular cell.

The choice of the mode of scanning depends on the type of

input and purpose for which it is being scanned