EVALUATING SITE INVESTIGATION QUALITY USING GIS AND GEOSTATISTICS. DISCUSSION AND CLOSURE

A discussion of an earlier paper with the aforementioned title, published in this journal (Volume 128, Number 6, June 2002), is presented. The discussers commend the authors for providing an interesting and innovative approach to capturing the completeness of site characterization and the dependability of resulting soil property estimates. The combination of traditional spatial statistical methods and modern information technology holds great promise for geotechnical engineering. The paper suggests a concrete approach to building on that promise. Some comments are offered herein related to use of the so-called Kriging estimators of geostatistics by the authors in their work. Closure from the authors on the points raised by the discussers is also provided.