Glossary#

  1. Geo-enhancement. Refers to the process od linking public survey coordinates with geospatial variables as its considered a form of enriching/enhancing the survey dataset.

  2. Coordinates. Geographic coordinates provided as Latitude and Longitude or in planar units (meters)

  3. Spatial Anonymization. The process of altering or blurring GPS coordinates in order to conceal the actual location. In some parts of this work, the term anonynimization is also used in place of the full phrase.

  4. Displacement. In this work, this has same meaning as anonymization. Other terms used in the same way include modified coordinates or displaced coordinates which are the coordinates we get after applying an anonymization process to the raw coordinates.

  5. Household A unit of analysis, often associated with one family or group of people living together as used in household surveys. For example, the most confidential geographic information available is that of a household. A household is often identified by a unique ID.

  6. Enumeration area Also called cluster and often abbreviated as EA. This is a primary sampling unit used in surveys. An EA is identified by the admin regions it falls in. For example, province + region + district + EA. In a survey, one EA will be associated with multiple households.

  7. Enumeration area centroid A simple anonymization technique of aggregation can be used to conceal household level coordinates and present only one coordinated (a centroid) for each EA. This centroid is calculated as an average for the x coordinates (e.g, longitude) a d for y coordinates (e.g., latitude)

  8. Disclosure. Also called re-identification means ability to identify actual coordinates from the anonymized copordinates.

  9. Geovariable A variable generated from a geospatial dataset.

  10. DHS Program A USAID funded program which conducts Demographic and Health Surveys around the globe. Its one of the first teams to develop a procedure for anonymizing survey coordinates and disseminating them.