The aerospace and defense company Saab is developing a new fighter jet, JAS 39 Gripen E. One of the subsystems to be developed is the system that provides geographical data for the fighter. The system used to use data only from the National Land Survey Agency in Sweden, but now also uses more controversial data sources, such as Open Street Map. Quality assessment is needed to ensure that such data are used in a responsible way.

The purpose of this study is to develop a guide for a future process of assessing quality. The process is going to be a part of the development of the new system for providing geographical data for the fighter. Saab wants to know what quality of spatial data is, how those quality parameters can be evaluated and how these may be reported.

This report includes a survey of studies of what quality is and how the quality of Open Street Map data has been tested before. Aspects of the quality of geographical data in military organizations were addressed by means of an interview. The studies of quality and the interview constitute the basis for locating the most important quality parameters. Methods to evaluate these quality parameters were then developed by tests of the evaluation data.

The result is a guide for future weapon systems that indicates what a process for estimating the quality of spatial data sets may look like.

The methods that were developed in this study should not be regarded as ascertaining the quality of a geographical dataset. Rather, these methods only provide an estimate of the quality of the dataset for further comparison. The method of evaluation and the quality of the reference data are parameters that affect the outcome.