How are consumers determining whether spatial data is suitable for them? Today, the Internet provides access to plenty of mapping data of varying quality. To date, literature and industry conventions have both assumed that finding data which is fit for a given purpose, predominantly involves reading standardized data about the data (or ‘metadata’). Metadata has to be written by the data provider and relentlessly updated as the data changes. This approach presumably made sense in 1983, before the Internet and Google were household terms, but where is the empirical evidence of potential consumers using metadata today? This thesis explores consumers’ experiences and argues that, for the typical spatial data consumer, data quality metadata plays virtually no role in determining whether a dataset is suitable or good enough for their use. Instead, their goals are to (1) try to find an understandable description of the data content and then (2) use the dataset to form their own opinion of its reliability. Therefore, to communicate fitness for use, data providers need to focus on including quality as part of the data description or implicitly portray quality as part of data use.

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