Method

Advantages

Disadvantages

Handheld GPS

Good for rural areas where open spaces are abundant while landmarks are absent, such as road intersections, building shapes, etc.

Small and handy Provide software to integrate with other computational devices (e.g. notebook, netbook, etc.)

Good for geologists, archaeologists, ecologists, etc.

Landscape dependent, accuracy varies on the type of landscape such as open space or semi-open space or closed space and availability of WAAS Wide Area Augmentation System.

Built-in GPS or wireless access point

Good for urban area studies where wireless access is available Easy to read coordinates from built-in GPS devices or Wi-Fi-based positioning systems

Requires wireless networking infrastructure Costly (i.e. smartphone and tablet PC)

Accuracy can vary 10 to 20 m

Basemap with high resolution satellite images (<1 m spatial resolution)

Good for urban area studies where the landmarks are abundant (road intersections, building shapes, traffic signs, etc.)

Landscape independent Much accurate than other methods

Requires prior knowledge of that area Requires software to use^*

Costly for purchasing data, processing time and storage device^*

Geocoding and address matching

Good for large amounts of data conversion, such as patient address, customer address, etc.

Timely manner Good for finding spatial relationships between humans and the environment, health, disease dispersion, etc.

Requires national scale geodatabase, such as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)

Accuracy depends on dataset available, such as the level of the street or parcel unit Not applicable for developing countries where fine scale GIS data are absent