A decade ago, Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) was identified as a new source of information that would blur the traditional boundary between producers and the consumers of data (Goodchil...

Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue for improvements in environmental governance and social-environmental justice. In this paper we show how we carried out a usability engineering effort in the "wild" context of the Congolese rainforest -- designing, evaluating and iteratively improving novel collaborative data collection interfaces for non-literate forest communities that can subsequently be used to facilitate communication and information sharing with logging companies. Working in this context necessitates adopting a thoroughly flexible approach to the design, development, introduction and evaluation of technology and the modes of interaction it offers. We show that we have improved participant accuracy from about 75% towards 95% and provide a set of guidelines for designing and evaluating ICT solutions in "extreme circumstances" -- which hold lessons for CSCW, HCI and ICT4D practitioners dealing with similar challenges.

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.

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.

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.

This paper provides a new representation for fields (continuous surfaces) in Geographical Information Systems (GIS), based on the notion of spatial functions and their combinations. Following Tomlin's (Citation1990) Map Algebra, the term ‘Map Calculus' is used for this new representation. In Map Calculus, GIS layers are stored as functions, and new layers can be created by combinations of other functions. This paper explains the principles of Map Calculus and demonstrates the creation of function-based layers and their supporting management mechanism. The proposal is based on Church's (Citation1941) Lambda Calculus and elements of functional computer languages (such as Lisp or Scheme).

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.