Analysis of information quality for a usable information system in agriculture domain : a study in the Sri Lankan context

In creating a usable Information System (IS), the quality of information is crucial for making the right decisions. Although, many Information Quality (IQ) features have been identified in a broader context, only certain IQ features would become applicable for each domain from the usability perspective. This study focuses on a theoretical analysis to identify the IQ features which would be significant to produce a usable agricultural information system with respect to the developing countries. Accuracy, Credibility, Context-specific, Completeness and Timeliness are identified as the essential features of the IQ for IS in agriculture which was substantiated through the preliminary analysis of user reviews on the agriculture mobile applications

A conceptual model for ontology quality assessment

With the continuous advancement of methods, tools, and techniques in ontology development, ontologies have emerged in various fields such as machine learning, robotics, biomedical informatics, agricultural informatics, crowdsourcing, database management, and the Internet of Things. Nevertheless, the nonexistence of a universally agreed methodology for specifying and evaluating the quality of an ontology hinders the success of ontology-based systems in such fields as the quality of each component is required for the overall quality of a system and in turn impacts the usability in use. Moreover, a number of anomalies in definitions of ontology quality concepts are visible, and in addition to that, the ontology quality assessment is limited only to a certain set of characteristics in practice even though some other significant characteristics have to be considered for the specified use-case. Thus, in this research, a comprehensive analysis was performed to uncover the existing contributions specifically on ontology quality models, characteristics, and the associated measures of these characteristics. Consequently, the characteristics identified through this review were classified with the associated aspects of the ontology evaluation space. Furthermore, the formalized definitions for each quality characteristic are provided through this study from the ontological perspective based on the accepted theories and standards. Additionally, a thorough analysis of the extent to which the existing works have covered the quality evaluation aspects is presented and the areas further to be investigated are outlined

Design science research based blended approach for usability driven requirements gathering and application development

Extracting user requirements in designing innovative ICT based solutions for emerging vague problems is a challenge. We successfully addressed this challenge by blending several techniques in Software Engineering (SE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) within a Design Science Research (DSR) framework. These techniques were traditional surveys and interviews, causal analysis, scenario creation and transformation, use of paper-based and functional prototypes for communicating with users and capturing their feedback, user centered design, and incremental development. This approach enabled us to better capture requirements based on usability aspects and guided us to design a successful solution. We present a framework derived from this research for wider applicability

Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System

Very high adoption of mobile phones in developing countries can be used to empower people engaged in various sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and healthcare by providing timely information in right context, thus facilitating them to make informed decisions. Having identified lack of such information is badly affecting farmers in Sri Lanka we embarked on a project to develop a mobile based agriculture information system. We had to combine different theories and methods both from Requirements engineering (RE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on a need basis to successfully gather the requirements. When we retraced the process we saw a definitive systematic pattern as to how RE and HCI can be used to enrich such an artefact; highlighting the strong interplay between RE and HCI. Discovery of this pattern enabled us to generalise the process