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Another survey

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There is another survey for open data satellite image users, this time from the Copernicus program:

http://www.copernicus.eu/COAHub-user-survey

In contrast to the Landsat survey i featured recently – which by the way you can still participate in – this one is the usual multiple choice survey. It is not anonymous though, they ask you to provide your name and other details about yourself.

The survey questions have quite clearly been put together with the aim to put a lot of subjects into the survey while formally limiting it to no more than 20 questions. The result are many compound questions which try to ask several things at once which will inevitably lead to the answers not being very useful. For example there are the following two questions:

11. Data products - Please indicate your level of satisfaction
* Sentinel-1 data - Poor/Average/Good/Excellent or N/A
* Sentinel-2 data - Poor/Average/Good/Excellent or N/A
* Sentinel-3 data - Poor/Average/Good/Excellent or N/A

12. Processing levels and data formats -
Please indicate your level of satisfaction
* Processing levels (L0, L1, L2, ...) - Poor/Average/Good/Excellent or N/A
* Data formats - Poor/Average/Good/Excellent or N/A

There first is a question of general satisfaction with the data, separately for the different platforms – which makes sense. But then there is the more specific question of satisfaction with specifics of the data format and processing – which only makes sense to look at for each satellite platform individually but which can only be answered in total.

The sad thing about this is the aim of keeping the number of questions low is to allow people to participate in the survey with relatively little time but this kind of compound or aggregated questions actually make answering much slower because you will need to weight your observations to be able to give an answer.

And in the results of the survey you then might see that satisfaction with the data format is overwhelmingly in the Average-Good range while in fact users are often extremely happy with the Sentinel-1 format but extremely dissatisfied with that of Sentinel-3. In other words: If they were really interested in differentiated information on user satisfaction they should have asked the questions differently.

I would still encourage anyone who ever used Copernicus Sentinel data to participate in the survey. Even though things like those asked in the questions above are highly unlikely to change substantially and many important questions are not asked it is important to show that users have a differentiated opinion on matters and are not indifferent to aspects of quality of data and data access services.

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