Public environmental information: understanding requirements and patterns of likely public use

Public access to environmental information received much attention in the last decade. Recent developments promote access to this information through public telecommunication networks. This paper describes a Web-based survey that explored the requirements and needs of likely users of public environmental information systems for London: educated middle-class members of the public, with high interest in environmental issues and computer literacy. The survey demonstrated current information consumption patterns and the reasons to gather and use such information.     

Usability evaluation and PPGIS: towards a user-centred design approach

Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) is a field of research that, among other things, focuses on the use of GIS by non-experts and occasional users. These users tend to have a diverse range of computer literacy, world views, cultural backgrounds and knowledge. These aspects require that the systems used within PPGIS are accessible and easy to use. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the related usability evaluation techniques focus on how to make computer systems more accessible, while focusing on user needs and requirements. Thus, the synergy between PPGIS and HCI seems natural. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of this synergy, building on our experience from three workshops. We demonstrate how usability evaluation can contribute to PPGIS research, and how PPGIS research can contribute to the HCI aspects of GIS in general. We conclude this paper with a call for a user-centred design approach to PPGIS projects.     

Trust in Web GIS: the role of the trustee attributes in the design of trustworthy Web GIS applications

Since the introduction of Xerox PARC Map Viewer, there is a high growth in the number of Web GIS (Geographical Information System) applications for public use in different contexts. These applications instruct, advise and provide the tools for spatial analysis to their users, and the people who use them depend or rely on these systems. Many of these users are non-experts who have no GIS expertise and a limited understanding of spatial data handling. These inherent characteristics of non-expert interaction establish risk and uncertainty, which are further increased due to the complexity of Web GIS interfaces. These issues of uncertainty, risk perception and dependence are all trust-related aspects. Online trust has been repeatedly identified as a major concept for online information systems and its value recognised as it influences the intentions to use and the acceptance of online systems and the overall user experience. However, there is a very limited understanding as to exactly how trust is constructed when people, especially non-experts, interact with Web GIS. To improve knowledge in this domain, this article explores the theoretical foundations on how trust can be investigated in this context. Trust studies (mainly from the e-commerce domain) suggest that a trust-oriented interface design may improve the trustworthiness of online systems, and such attention can be given to Web GIS interfaces. Such studies are reviewed and their applicability is considered in the Web GIS context, taking into consideration their special characteristics. A case study is used to discuss how some features may potentially influence the trustworthiness of Web GIS applications. This article concludes by suggesting future research directions for the implementation of a holistic approach, which is necessary to investigate trust in this context.     

A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

With the ubiquity of advanced web technologies and location-sensing hand held devices, citizens regardless of their knowledge or expertise, are able to produce spatial information. This phenomenon is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI). During the past decade VGI has been used as a data source supporting a wide range of services, such as environmental monitoring, events reporting, human movement analysis, disaster management, etc. However, these volunteer-contributed data also come with varying quality. Reasons for this are: data is produced by heterogeneous contributors, using various technologies and tools, having different level of details and precision, serving heterogeneous purposes, and a lack of gatekeepers. Crowd-sourcing, social, and geographic approaches have been proposed and later followed to develop appropriate methods to assess the quality measures and indicators of VGI. In this article, we review various quality measures and indicators for selected types of VGI and existing quality assessment methods. As an outcome, the article presents a classification of VGI with current methods utilized to assess the quality of selected types of VGI. Through these findings, we introduce data mining as an additional approach for quality handling in VGI.     

Axisymmetric soil–structure interaction by global–local finite elements

A version of the global–local finite element method is presented for studying dynamic steady-state soil–structure interaction wherein the soil medium extends to infinity. Herein, only axisymmetric behaviour is considered. In this approach, conventional finite elements are used to model the structure and some portion of the surrounding soil medium considered to be homogeneous and isotropic. A complete set of outgoing waves in the form of spherical harmonics for the entire space is used to represent the behaviour in the half-space beyond the finite element mesh and these are termed the global functions. Full traction and displacement continuity is enforced at the finite element mesh interface with the outer region. On the free surface of the half-space in the outer field, traction-free surface conditions are enforced by demanding that a sequence of integrals of the weighted-average tractions must vanish. Numerical examples are presented for the response of different shaped foundations, resting on the free surface or at various submerged levels, due to a normal seismic plane compressional wave. Plots of differential scattering cross-sections show the angular distribution of the energy (its directional nature) of the scattered field.     

Requirements for Topology in 3D GIS

Topology and its various benefits are well understood within the context of 2D Geographical Information Systems. However, requirements in three‐dimensional (3D) applications have yet to be defined, with factors such as lack of users’ familiarity with the potential of such systems impeding this process. In this paper, we identify and review a number of requirements for topology in 3D applications. The review utilises existing topological frameworks and data models as a starting point. Three key areas were studied for the purposes of requirements identification, namely existing 2D topological systems, requirements for visualisation in 3D and requirements for 3D analysis supported by topology. This was followed by analysis of application areas such as earth sciences and urban modelling which are traditionally associated with GIS, as well as others including medical, biological and chemical science. Requirements for topological functionality in 3D were then grouped and categorised. The paper concludes by suggesting that these requirements can be used as a basis for the implementation of topology in 3D. It is the aim of this review to serve as a focus for further discussion and identification of additional applications that would benefit from 3D topology.     

A less‐is‐more approach to geovisualization – enhancing knowledge construction across multidisciplinary teams

The ‘less‐is‐more’ concept in interface design for computer applications has recently gained ground. In this article, the concept is adopted for a user‐centered design of geovisualization application. The premise is that using simple and clear design can lead to successful applications with improved ease of use. Over the last three decades, the development of GIS and geovisualization has seen a marked increase in the levels of interaction between the user, the system and the information. However, these enthusiastic advances in technology have not resulted in a significant increase in the number of users.

This article suggests that types of user interaction should not simply emphasize traditional GIS functions such as zooming and panning but move towards interaction based on facilitating the knowledge construction process. Considerations are made for the complexity of the system, the task at hand and the skills and limitations of the users. These elements are particularly important when maps act as the mediators in collaboration with users across disciplinary backgrounds. In such cases, the emphasis on simplicity and usability becomes as important as functionality. In these situations a geovisualization application designed for specific uses can maximize effective development of geographic knowledge.

In this article, a minimalistic design approach to geovisualization is adopted by creating a geographic profiling tool which shifts the emphasis from technological advances or interaction with the map to the interaction elements key to building the spatial knowledge of GIS experts and non‐experts alike. To evaluate this notion of ‘less‐is‐more geovisualization’ the profiling tool is evaluated according to usability matrices: efficiency, effectiveness and learnability. How well the Suburban Profiler contributes to these elements is assessed by conducting a video analysis of the types and forms of user interaction available. The video analysis demonstrates the usefulness and usability of the Suburban Profiler, providing proof of concept for ‘less‐is‐more geovisualization’.     

Guidelines for trust interface design for public engagement Web GIS

Attesting to the powerful capabilities and in technology trends, many scholars envisioned the consolidation of geographic information systems (GIS) into vital tools for disseminating spatial information. GIS are presently used to inform, advise and instruct users in several contexts and to further engage citizens in decision-making processes that can impact and sustain policy development. Interaction with these applications incorporates risk and uncertainty, which have been repeatedly identified as preconditions in nurturing trust perceptions and which instigate a user's decision to rely on a system and act on the provided information. Research studies consistently demonstrated that a trust-oriented interface design can facilitate the development of more trustworthy, mainly e-commerce, systems. Trust in the Web GIS context, despite its significance, has only relatively recently received some attention. A set of human–computer interaction (HCI) user-based studies revealed some Web GIS trustee attributes that influence non-experts' trust beliefs and found that when these are problematic or absent from interface design, users form irrational trust perceptions, which amplifies the risk and may impose dangers to the user. These Web GIS trustee attributes that influence non-experts' trust perceptions are formulated here into a set of trust guidelines. These are then evaluated using the PE-Nuclear tool, a Web GIS application, to inform the public about the site selection of a nuclear waste repository in the United Kingdom. Our preliminary results indicate that the proposed trust guidelines not only support the development of rational trust perceptions that protect non-experts from inappropriate use of Web GIS technology but also contribute towards improving interaction with such applications of public interest issue.     

Assessing Data Completeness of VGI through an Automated Matching Procedure for Linear Data

New, free and fast growing spatial data sources have appeared online, based on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the most representative projects of this trend. Its increasing popularity and density makes the study of its data quality an imperative. A common approach is to compare OSM with a reference dataset. In such cases, data matching is necessary for the comparison to be meaningful, and is usually performed manually at the data preparation stage. This article proposes an automated feature‐based matching method specifically designed for VGI, based on a multi‐stage approach that combines geometric and attribute constraints. It is applied to the OSM dataset using the official data from Ordnance Survey as the reference dataset. The results are then used to evaluate data completeness of OSM in several case studies in the UK.