The development of an experimental approach for the generation of a usability hypothesis about the academic use of geo-information

Very little attention has been given to understanding how academics obtain and use geo-information to support their tasks of teaching and research. Considering usability, fewer methods have been developed for determining the potential use of geoinformation. This paper describes our efforts to develop an experimental approach to generate a usability hypothesis on the academic use of geo-information. This approach is based on a step-wise process that includes the identification of a usability premise, the performance of a user survey, the analysis of the results, and finally, the inference of a usability hypothesis. Towards a consistent identification of a usability premise, a web questionnaire was designed and distributed to academics from 25 Spanish Universities, covering several scientific and technological fields. Three usability elements have been considered in the questionnaire: purpose of use, trust and accessibility of geoinformation. More than 100 answers have been received showing how the academics strongly welcomed the questionnaire and how involved they are in using geoinformation for both education and research activities. Very little attention has been given to understanding how academics obtain and use geo-information to support their tasks of teaching and research. Considering usability, fewer methods have been developed for determining the potential use of geoinformation. This paper describes our efforts to develop an experimental approach to generate a usability hypothesis on the academic use of geo-information. This approach is based on a step-wise process that includes the identification of a usability premise, the performance of a user survey, the analysis of the results, and finally, the inference of a usability hypothesis. Towards a consistent identification of a usability premise, a web questionnaire was designed and distributed to academics from 25 Spanish Universities, covering several scientific and technological fields. Three usability elements have been considered in the questionnaire: purpose of use, trust and accessibility of geoinformation. More than 100 answers have been received showing how the academics strongly welcomed the questionnaire and how involved they are in using geoinformation for both education and research activities. In fact, only 6% of the answers reveal the lack of use of geo-information. The results show a high level of trust in the quality of geo-information, and that there are less difficulties of accessing geoinformation than previously expected. However, the existing accessibility issues are mainly related to the lack of knowledge and use of metadata (formats) and Spatial Data Infrastructures (interoperability). The main findings confirm the important role of identifying a usability premise based on explicit users input that will support a usability hypothesis

WMS Integrator: continuous access to neighboring WMS

The INSPIRE Directive, and SDI initiatives, promote that geographic data (GI) is updated and maintained in the most appropriate level or who is responsible. This fact motivates the emergence of many map services (WMS) that offer the same data in different geographical contexts. The atomization of WMS, for geographic domains, difficult the use for users interested in a topic: they must search for WMS, select layers and handle overlapping. This poster presents a facilitator node that manages WMS: URLs, layers, CRS, formats and versions, and offering a seamless WMS that integrate horizontally and vertically layers offered by WMS cascaded. The most important contributions of developed facilitator node (WMS-integrator) are the ability to: carry out some verifications, requests to the different WMS versions, mask spatially responses by boundaries polygons and merge the responses to finally deliver a single image as result that avoid data overlappin

La usabilidad de los geoportales: Aplicación del Diseño Orientado a Metas (DOM)

Un geoportal es un sitio Web cuyo objetivo es ofrecer al usuario, de forma práctica e integrada, el acceso a una serie de recursos y servicios basados en información geográfica. Así, dentro una Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales, los geoportales resuelven la conexión física y funcional entre los almacenes de datos geográficos y los usuarios de Información Geográfica. El interfaz de los geoportales, definido como el conjunto de disposiciones y métodos que permiten la intercomunicación de los recursos y servicios, no atiende en la mayoría de los casos a soluciones estandarizadas ni a criterios de usabilidad. Por ello el proyecto de investigación que aquí se expone pretende como objetivo general y particularmente enfocado al usuario: que cualquier ciudadano, independientemente de sus inquietudes, perfil profesional y habilidades cognitivas, tenga una experiencia satisfactoria en el uso de los geoportales IDE. A partir de la aplicación de la técnica de Diseño Orientado a Metas (DOM) para la búsqueda de una arquitectura de interfaz eficiente, es posible dotar a los actuales geoportales de un nuevo concepto basado en las capacidades cognitivas y en las necesidades reales de los usuarios a los que pretende dar soporte. Gira en torno a tres aspectos fundamentales: los personajes, las metas del usuario y los escenarios. El proceso se organiza en un número de fases discretas que se desarrolla de modo secuencial. Los resultados de cada fase proporcionan los datos de entrada para la siguiente, aumentando sucesivamente la riqueza de los resultados. Las bondades de esta técnica, que coinciden con las fases de su aplicación, van a paliar la escasez de fundamentos necesarios para optimizar la estructura funcional de un sistema informático referido a la geo-información. • Concreta la tarea de captura de información cualitativa de usuarios potenciales de geoportales y encauza el posterior aprovechamiento de este conocimiento. Crea una serie de modelos descriptivos de usuarios (personajes) basados en la investigación anterior, los cuales sintetizan características y metas relevantes que deben ser consideradas prioritarias al diseñar soluciones prácticas. • Define una serie de requisitos en base a la interacción de los modelos de usuario dentro de diferentes escenarios de uso, concretando así las necesidades funcionales básicas del sistema que deben materializarse. • Determina la forma más idónea de desarrollar una especificación formal que describa detalladamente el aspecto, la estructura, el comportamiento y el flujo de interacción de la aplicación a crear. En consecuencia, esta contribución se va estructurar de la siguiente forma: • Se describen los fundamentos e ideas básicas de la metodología de Diseño Orientada a Metas (DOM). • Se propone una metodología concreta, particularmente enfocada a la creación de geoportales de filosofía IDE, que sirva para poder aplicar esta técnica de manera rápida y efectiva. • Se resume la experiencia extraída de su aplicación en un ejemplo concreto, una maqueta de geoportal poseedora de una interfaz orientada a resolver distintas metas de usuarios. • Se realiza un trabajo de abstracción proponiendo un conjunto de conclusiones aplicable a cualquier geoportal abierto por una entidad o institución cualquiera interesada en difundir datos y servicios geográficos. Basándose en la investigación, se puede concluir que el DOM, más que una teoría cerrada sobre interacción persona-ordenador, es un enfoque de diseño. Esto es lo que hace de ella una herramienta muy versátil que logra superar el gran problema de las metodologías de usabilidad actuales: sirven para encontrar y solucionar pequeños problemas, pero no para encontrar mejores soluciones globales. Por último, sorprende también su capacidad para generar nuevas ideas, de modo que en el caso de estudio considerado ha sido capaz de completar una alternativa funcional claramente distinta a lo que puede encontrarte en la mayoría de geoportales actuales

Towards Mapping Experience Design for the Internet of Things.

We are witnessing a fundamental transformation in how Internet of Things (IoT) is having an impact on the experience users have with data-driven devices, smart appliances, and connected products. The experience of any place is commonly defined as the result of a series of user engagements with a surrounding place in order to carry out daily activities (Golledge, 2002). Knowing about users? experiences becomes vital to the process of designing a map. In the near future, a user will be able to interact directly with any IoT device placed in his surrounding place and very little is known on what kinds of interactions and experiences a map might offer (Roth, 2015). The main challenge is to develop an experience design process to devise maps capable of supporting different user experience dimensions such as cognitive, sensory-physical, affective, and social (Tussyadiah and Zach, 2012). For example, in a smart city of the future, the IoT devices allowing a multimodal interaction with a map could help tourists in the assimilation of their knowledge about points of interest (cognitive experience), their association of sounds and smells to these places (sensory-physical experience), their emotional connection to them (affective experience) and their relationships with other nearby tourists (social experience). This paper aims to describe a conceptual framework for developing a Mapping Experience Design (MXD) process for building maps for smart connected places of the future. Our MXD process is focussed on the cognitive dimension of an experience in which a person perceives a place as a "living entity" that uses and feeds through his experiences. We want to help people to undergo a meaningful experience of a place through mapping what is being communicated during their interactions with the IoT devices situated in this place. Our purpose is to understand how maps can support a person?s experience in making better decisions in real-time

Developing a synthesis process for producing schematic maps from cognitive maps.

Everything humans know of reality is conditioned by the perception of geographical features in such a way that their responses to a situation are not made based on the actual physical environment, but on the cognitive map they have of it. Cognitive maps are internal abstractions of a set of geographical features that have been learned for solving different tasks such as navigation, planning and management. In contrast, schematic maps have been designed by map makers for intentionally emphasizing certain aspects of geographical features in detriment of others by using topographically and geometrically inaccurate generalizations. However, schematic maps play a more important role in providing a unique tool for modeling the representation of cognitive knowledge, assuming that there is a correspondence between the internal abstractions (cognitive maps) and external abstractions (schematic maps). In this paper, we propose an unique approach to synthesise the knowledge represented in cognitive maps for producing ?cognitive-aware? schematic maps that are needed to support the needs of people in motion in urban areas. The overall synthesis process is intentionally centered on user perception. A case study is used to illustrate the process for producing ?cognitive-aware? schematic maps for tourists in Madrid, Spain

Desarrollo de mapas a través del diseño de experiencias de usuario

Las posibilidades de acceso a la información geográfica se han multiplicado en las últimas décadas. La diversidad de situaciones y tipologías de usuarios que consultan mapas hace que su representación sea un problema complejo. Para garantizar la usabilidad de los mapas, existen varios trabajos de investigación que abordan su desarrollo siguiendo procesos de diseño centrados en el usuario. El objetivo de esta investigación trasciende la mejora del rendimiento del usuario en la interacción con los mapas y propone considerar su experiencia como una nueva forma de conceptualizar la tarea objeto de la visualización de la información geográfica. La investigación se centra en la componente cognitiva de la experiencia de los usuarios y la hipótesis a corroborar es que: los mapas se pueden considerar instrumentos activos en los procesos cognitivos de los usuarios, que inciden en su comportamiento y en sus experiencias del espacio. Con tal fin, se plantea la pregunta de investigación ¿Cómo desarrollar mapas que den soporte a la experiencia cognitiva del usuario, asociada a un determinado espacio urbano? En el presente trabajo los mapas se conciben como interfaces entre el usuario y el espacio geográfico y se propone un proceso para desarrollarlos que tiene en cuenta la forma en la que el usuario afronta la experiencia del espacio a representar y establece correspondencias entre su mapa cognitivo y los mapas a diseñar. El proceso propuesto consta de cuatro fases que abordan: 1) la concepción del contexto asociado a la experiencia, 2) la exploración de la experiencia de los usuarios, 3) la síntesis de dicha experiencia (identificación de patrones en las interacciones entre los usuarios, los ambientes o entornos del espacio urbano y los mapas que utilizan) y 4) el diseño de prototipos de los mapas. En cada una de ellas se ejecutan una serie de tareas en las que se aplican varias técnicas de diseño. De este modo, el cartógrafo asimila el conocimiento que precisa a cerca de la experiencia de los usuarios, para diseñar los mapas. El proceso de diseño de experiencias propuesto integra conocimientos de varias áreas: psicología cognitiva (usuarios y mapas mentales), análisis geográfico (contextos), diseño cartográfico (visualización de datos) y nuevas tecnologías (mapas personalizados al vuelo en dispositivos móviles). Para su validación, el proceso se ha aplicado al turismo en Madrid, como caso de estudio. Como resultado, se han diseñado varios mapas adaptados a turistas que afrontan su experiencia en Madrid de diferentes maneras (exploradora, guiada y condicionada) y en distintos ambientes: durante la planificación y ejecución de la visita, con el fin de dar soporte a su experiencia cognitiva de la ciudad. Esta investigación propone una nueva metodología que ofrece un marco general para el desarrollo de mapas que asistan a los usuarios en sus experiencias, dentro de un contexto multidisciplinario y multifacético más complejo. Este contexto se caracteriza por espacios geográficos como las denominadas ciudades inteligentes y por dispositivos innovadores que basados en nuevas tecnologías (nanotecnologías, IoT, wearables,...) son capaces de identificar, reconocer y proponer a cada usuario mapas, de forma activa y en tiempo real. ABSTRACT The possibilities to access geographic information have multiplied in recent decades. The diversity of situations and user types consulting maps makes its representation a complex issue. There is much research about developing maps following user‐centered design processes in order to ensure their usability. This work aims to go beyond improving the performance of the user interaction with maps by proposing to consider the user experience as a new way of conceptualizing the geographic information visualization task. This thesis focuses on the cognitive component of the user experience and the research hypothesis is that: maps can be viewed as active instruments in the users’ cognitive processes, affecting how they behave and how they experience space. The research question that arises is: how to develop maps that support the user cognitive experience in relation to a particular urban space?. In this work, maps are conceived of as interfaces between the user and geographic space. To develop these maps we propose a process that takes into account the experience of the user vis‐à‐vis the space represented and that establishes a connection between the user’s cognitive map and the map to be designed. This process consists of four phases which address: 1) the association between context and experience, 2) an exploration of the user experience, 3) a synthesis of this experience (identifying interaction patterns between users, locations or environments in urban space, and the maps being used) and 4) the design of map prototypes. In each of these phases, a series of tasks involving different design techniques are executed. These design techniques enable the cartographer to assimilate the knowledge about the user experience into the design of the maps. The process put forth to design experiences incorporates knowledge from different disciplines: cognitive psychology (user and mental maps), geographical analysis (contexts), cartographic design (data visualization), and new technologies (custom maps on mobile devices on the fly), and has been validated by applying it to the case study of tourism in Madrid. As a result, several maps have been designed for tourists, tailored to the different experiences of Madrid they could have (exploratory, guided, or conditioned) and to the different environments they will find themselves into while planning and during the visit, in order to support their cognitive experience of the city. This research proposes a new methodology that provides a general framework for the development of maps that assist users in their experiences within a more complex multidisciplinary and multifaceted context. This context is characterized by geographical areas, such as “smart cities”, and innovative devices based on new technologies (nanotechnology, IoT, wearables, etc.) that are able to identify, recognize and propose actively and in real time maps to each user