KEYBOARD ENTRY

Keyboard entry is often referred to as keycoding. It involves data entry into a file at a computer terminal. This technique is mainly used for entering attribute data that are only available on paper. For a small amount of data keyboard entry is a manageable task with the possibility of typographical errors. With the increasing amount of data, alternatives in the form of text scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) softwares are increasingly being used to read in data automatically. Attribute data, in a digital format, are linked to relevant map features in the spatial database using identification codes. These codes are allocated to each point, line or area feature in the dataset.
The coordinates of spatial entities can be entered by keyboard entry. However, this method can be used only when the coordinates are known and there are not too many to be entered.