Spatial Qualitative Risk Analysis (SQRA) is a collaborative method and tool developed by Cirad and partners for sharing the knowledge of a college of academic and field experts in veterinary epidemiology and animal health about the relative risks of introduction and dissemination of an animal or zoonotic infectious disease within a territory. SQRA is of particular interest when historical records about the disease in question are scarce or inexistent (exotic, or new emerging disease). It is also very useful to target high-risk areas and / or time periods, and to prioritize disease surveillance and control activities. Although the collegial procedure might help reducing subjective biases, the accuracy of the outcome is necessarily limited by the quality and amount of information available to the experts and to the analyst. Therefore, a validation step is proposed to assess the predictive performance of the SQRA maps, based on either observed disease outbreaks or planned surveillance data such as a serological survey on a representative sample of the target population. Rather than adopting a binary mindset of either accepting or rejecting an SQRA map, this analysis should be regarded as an assessment of prior knowledge embodied in the map. It provides an opportunity to identify gaps in the epidemiological knowledge to update the collective perception of disease risk in a progressive process of learning by accumulating evidence.