Resumen
The importance of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) is great in geosciences, but a general view of users and uses which would bring the concept of quality closer to users is lacking. For this reason, the aim of this paper was three-fold: to obtain better knowledge of users, determine the main application domains of DEMs, and identify main use cases. For this purpose, we used data from two web questionnaires (MR1 and MR2), a search of the ScienceDirect database (MR3) and a Google search (MR4). The data coming from the MR1 resource have offered us a large number of cases in order to characterise the profile of users in Spain. The MR2 resource is an ad hoc designed survey which has allowed us, among other things, to identify those calculations that are more normal; determine that subjective evaluation of quality is of great importance for users; and conclude that there is a high percentage of users who do not use any quality index, and also that the majority of users do not know how to evaluate the influence of poor quality on their work. Through MR3, it was possible to analyse the relationships between relevant items and carry out a semantic analysis of a set of 950 abstracts. From MR4, it can be concluded that the formalisation of applications as use cases is not normal. This paper identifies some research lines in order to offer users a better understanding of the issue of quality regarding DEMs.