Geoportals: an internet marketing perspective

A geoportal is a web site that presents an entry point to geo-products (including geo-data) on the web. Despite their importance in (spatial) data infrastructures, literature suggest stagnating or even declining trends in visitor numbers. In this paper relevant ideas and techniques for improving performance are derived from internet marketing literature. We tested the extent to which these ideas are already applied in practice through a survey among 48 geoportals worldwide. Results show in many cases positive correlation with trends in visitor numbers. The ideas can be useful for geoportal managers developing their marketing strateg

A Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Economic Analysis and Spatial Decision-Making

abstract: Urban economic modeling and effective spatial planning are critical tools towards achieving urban sustainability. However, in practice, many technical obstacles, such as information islands, poor documentation of data and lack of software platforms to facilitate virtual collaboration, are challenging the effectiveness of decision-making processes. In this paper, we report on our efforts to design and develop a geospatial cyberinfrastructure (GCI) for urban economic analysis and simulation. This GCI provides an operational graphic user interface, built upon a service-oriented architecture to allow (1) widespread sharing and seamless integration of distributed geospatial data; (2) an effective way to address the uncertainty and positional errors encountered in fusing data from diverse sources; (3) the decomposition of complex planning questions into atomic spatial analysis tasks and the generation of a web service chain to tackle such complex problems; and (4) capturing and representing provenance of geospatial data to trace its flow in the modeling task. The Greater Los Angeles Region serves as the test bed. We expect this work to contribute to effective spatial policy analysis and decision-making through the adoption of advanced GCI and to broaden the application coverage of GCI to include urban economic simulations

Geocollaborative Portals And Trip Planning: Users’ Perceptions Of The Success Of The Collaborative Decision Making Processes

As more and more travelers wish to create their personalised trip itineraries, the provision of geographical information and services on travel websites is an unavoidable necessity. The evolution of geoportals, geocollaborative portals and web 2.0 present numerous opportunities and services for making the trip planning process less complex and time consuming, more efficient and more social and collaborative for travelers and their travel companions. This paper aimed at exploring the use and impact of geocollaborative portals on the success of collaborative trip planning processes. To that end, the literature was reviewed for analyzing the functionality of geoportals and geocollaborative portals and demonstrating how these can support and facilitate the collaborative decision making processes for trip planning purposes. A framework for measuring the impacts of geoportals’ use on travellers’ collaborative decision making processes was developed and tested by collecting primary data through an experimental study based on students’ perceptions using Yahoo! Trip Planner for planning a group trip. The paper provides useful practical guidelines for designing the functionality of geoportals and/or geocollaborative portals for trip planning purposes

Web services enabled architecture coupling data and functional resources

Web services are the backbone of WISDOM system, an information and visualisation system supporting decision makers in the fields of water related management processes based on open source technologies. They enable the distributed and loosely coupled, component based architecture of the system. In cooperating OGC compliant web services for data access, visualisation and data processing the system is extendible to external data resources and other proprietary software solutions. The base idea behind the designed and prototypically implemented WISDOM techniques is the orchestration of decoupled web resources representing data sets and functionality to model more complex business processes quite easily. The system covers most aspects of administrative business processes including spatial and non-spatial data ingestion and dissemination, necessary data processing and visualisation techniques. In combination with a semantics enabled data management WISDOM system is capable to produce value added information products to water management related tasks autonomously. These compound data and processing resource chains are implemented to facilitate certain identified business processes in regional administration. Clients like data and information explorers supporting manual interaction as human machine interfaces or automated data access of value adding operations accomplish, respectively trigger these integrative chains. As an example the same data and processing infrastructure is used to visualise data in map clients as WMS or access data as WCS, resp. WFS for further processing which can furthermore trigger additional actions like feeding reports or requesting auxiliary data

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPEN ACCESS GEOPORTAL

GeoPortal Systems are being considered one of the most important object in interoperability concept for Spatial data Management. With the developing technology of the information age, the need for accessing to spatial data is caused to effort for establishing national, regional and local information systems by institutes and organizations. Sharing and accessing of spatial datasets between institutes and organizations are being more important within interoperability concept.In this study, Open Access GeoPortal System is designed and applied to establish a common platform for institutes/organizations to analyze, interact, view, query and share spatial data. Open Access GeoPortal System, which is aimed to develop effective solutions in the field of using and sharing spatial data and establish interoperability concept, intends to provide an infrastructure for users to realize functions related with spatial data on web without installing any software. Open Access GeoPortal System is providing standardization stage acceleration, interoperability concept establishment and solutions to problems of spatial data thanks to the developed functions and processes which are working on international standardization organizations as like INSPIRE, ISO, W3C and OGC

National Carbon Sequestration Database and Geographic Information System (NatCarb)

This report provides a brief summary of the milestone for Quarter 1 of 2006 of the NATional CARBon Sequestration Database and Geographic Information System (NATCARB) This milestone assigns consistent symbology to the ''National CO{sub 2} Facilities'' GIS layer on the NATCARB website. As a default, CO{sub 2} sources provided by the Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships and the National Group are now all one symbol type. In addition for sinks such as oil and gas fields where data is drawn from multiple partnerships, the symbology is given a single color. All these modifications are accomplished as the layer is passed through the national portal (www.natcarb.org). This documentation is sent to National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) as a Topical Report and will be included in the next Annual Report

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Publicação de informação geográfica na web : um configurador assente em software de código aberto

Mestrado em Tecnologia e Gestão de Sistemas de Informação na Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Viana do CasteloOs sistemas de informação geográfica (SIG) experimentaram um desenvolvimento exponencial nos últimos anos. Hoje em dia, são encontrados nas mais diversas aplicações, com áreas de aplicabilidade tão diversas como a gestão de redes de comunicação, a gestão de recursos naturais, a gestão e manutenção de informação cadastral e a gestão de infra-estruturas, entre outras. Por outro lado, com a evolução da internet foram surgindo novas formas de aplicar os SIG através de aplicações que proporcionam a publicação de informação geográfica na Web, designados por aplicações WebSIG. Adicionalmente surge, na década de 90, o Open Geospatial Consortium que visa a regulamentação de especificações que possibilitem a integração da informação geográfica e, deste modo, permitir a interoperabilidade entre aplicações de origens e formatos distintos. Sendo a internet um meio privilegiado para a disponibilização de informação, as aplicações WebSIG tornam possível o acesso a dados espaciais distribuídos através de um navegador Web, habilitando, regra geral, a execução de operações simples de visualização, consulta e pesquisa, mas com uma tendência para incluir um crescente número de funcionalidades SIG. Paralelamente, tem vindo a crescer o fenómeno do software de código aberto, nomeadamente na área dos SIG e, em particular, no domínio das tecnologias WebSIG, com um vasto leque de opções que se apresentam como alternativas válidas e credíveis ao software proprietário. No âmbito deste projecto, propõe-se o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de apoio à publicação de informação geográfica na Web, através da implementação de um configurador, assente em software de código aberto, que facilite a disponibilização de informação geográfica de forma controlada, possibilitando a criação de aplicações WebSIG através de uma interface gráfica simples. O configurador foi desenvolvido de forma a permitir a criação de aplicações WebSIG por parte de utilizadores sem experiência na implementação deste tipo de soluções, permitindo a definição e configuração da informação geográfica a disponibilizar, das ferramentas que poderão ser utilizadas para a interacção com a informação espacial, assim como para realizar pesquisas sobre os dados disponíveis.The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have experienced an exponential growth in recent years. Nowadays, they are found in diverse domains, with application areas as diverse as the management of communication networks, management of natural resources, management and maintenance of cadastral information and infrastructure management, among others. On the other hand, the evolution of the Internet has enabled the emergence of new forms of applying GIS through applications that provide the publication of geographic information on the Web (designated as WebGIS applications). Additionally, in the 90s, the Open Geospatial Consortium was founded, concerned with the development of specifications that enable the integration of spatial information and thereby enable interoperability between applications from different sources and formats. Being the internet a privileged mean to provide information, WebGIS applications allow the access to distributed spatial data through a Web browser, enabling, in general, to perform simple operations of displaying, querying and searching, but with a tendency to include a growing number of GIS. In parallel, the phenomenon of open source software has been growing, namely in the area of GIS and, in particular, in the field of WebGIS technologies, with a wide range of options that present themselves as credible and valid alternatives to proprietary software. Under this project, we propose the development of a tool to support the publishing of geographic information on the Web, through the development of a configurator, based on open source software, which facilitates the distribution of geographic information in a controlled way, enabling the creation of WebGIS applications through a simple graphical user interface. The configurator was developed to enable the creation of WebGIS applications by users with no experience in implementing this type of solutions, allowing the definition and configuration of available geographic information, as well as to provide tools that can be used for interaction with spatial information and to perform queries over the data

Usability and credibility evaluation of electronic governments: users’ perspective

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.With the rapid development of the Internet and web technology, governments worldwide have caught onto this revolution and shown rapid development of electronic government (e-government) in the public sector. Nowadays, there are a significant number of e-governments that are accessible via the Internet and provide a range of information and services. However, existing research indicates that e-government still faces the challenge of generating greater users’ interaction in terms of accessing information, utilizing services and participating in e-government decision making. Among a variety of reasons for this challenge, usability and credibility have been found to be the key factors in users’ decisions about e-government engagement and need to be explored. This research attempts to evaluate the usability and credibility of current e-governments, focusing on specific e-government websites in the UK. This research adopted heuristic evaluation, which is based on users’ perception, to implement a thorough and in-depth assessment of e-government websites. In addition, to obtain a more comprehensive evaluation, users’ performance was measured in order to reveal the level of users’ interaction with e-government websites when they perform a set of practical tasks. The research design was a quasi-experimental, consisting of two linked experiments. Experiment 1 aimed to evaluate usability and credibility of the target e-government websites, identifying a range of existing usability and credibility problems. Based on the usability and credibility problems found, design solutions were proposed for each of the target e-government websites. Experiment 2 aimed to examine the effects of the proposed design solutions on the usability and credibility problems identified on the redesigned e-government websites. The findings of experiment 1 suggested that the e-government websites need to improve their usability and credibility. In particular, the most serious usability problems found in the target e-government websites lay within the areas of “aesthetic and minimalist design”, “recognition rather than recall”, and “consistency and standards”. In addition, the most serious credibility problems identified were within the areas of “site looks professional”, “make site easy to use and useful”, and “show the honest and trustworthy people behind the site”. The findings of experiment 2 revealed that the usability and credibility problems found in experiment 1 had been improved by the proposed design solutions. Furthermore, these improvements might increase the overall usability and credibility of the target e-government websites, making the users’ task performance better within the redesigned e-government websites. Based on the findings of the experiments, this research developed a set of usability and credibility guidelines. Each guideline addressed a number of the specific usability and credibility elements at the detailed level of e-government website design. These guidelines can be helpful to guide designers to develop more usable and credible e-government websites