Artemis Skarlatidou

What do lay people want to know about the disposal of nuclear waste? A mental model approach to the design and development of an online risk communication.

Public participation requires the involvement of lay people in the decision-making processes of issues that concern them. It is currently practiced in a variety of domains, such as transport and environmental planning. Communicating risks can be a complex task, as there may be significant differences between the risk perceptions of experts and those of lay people. Among the plethora of problems that require public involvement is the site selection of a nuclear waste disposal site in the United Kingdom, which is discussed in this article. Previous ineffective attempts to locate a site provide evidence that the problem has a strong social dimension, and studies ascribe public opposition to a loss of public trust in governmental agencies and decisionmakers, and to a lack of public understanding of nuclear waste issues. Although the mental models approach has been successfully used in the effective communication of such risks as climate change, no attempt has been made to follow a prescriptive mental model approach to develop risk communication messages that inform lay people about nuclear waste disposal. After interviewing 20 lay people and 5 experts, we construct and compare their corresponding mental models to reveal any gaps and misconceptions. The mental models approach is further applied here to identify lay peoples requirements regarding what they want to know about nuclear waste, and how this information should be presented so that it is easily understood. This article further describes how the mental models approach was used in the subsequent development of an online information system for the site selection of a nuclear waste repository in the United Kingdom, which is considered essential for the improvement of public understanding and the reestablishment of trust.

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.

Discriminant Analysis for Assigning Short-Term Counts to Seasonal Adjustment Factor Groupings

The assignment of short-term counts to groupings of seasonal adjustment factors is the most critical step in the annual average daily traffic estimation process; this step is also extremely sensitive to error resulting from engineering judgment. In this study, discriminant analysis is examined, and several variable selection criteria are investigated to develop 12 assignment models. Continuous traffic volume data, obtained in the state of Ohio during 2005 and 2006, are used in the analysis. Seasonal adjustment factors are calculated with individual volumes of the two directions of travel as well as the total volume of a roadway segment. The results reveal that the best-performing directional volume–based model, which employs the Raos V algorithm, produces a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.2%, which can be compared with errors reported in previous studies. An average decline in the MAE by 58% and in the standard deviation of the absolute error by 70% is estimated over the traditional roadway functional classification. In addition, time-of-day factors are slightly more effective in identifying similar patterns of short-term counts than when they are combined with the average daily traffic. When directional-specific factors are used instead of total volume–based seasonal adjustment factors, the improvement in the average MAE is approximately 41%. This conclusion is consistent with previous research findings and may result from the division of the data set by direction essentially doubling the sample size, which in turn increases the number of assignment options for a short-term count.

Understanding the influence of specific Web GIS attributes in the formation of non-experts’ trust perceptions

The Web has facilitated wider access to spatial information and allowed non-experts to view, use, access and build maps using Web GIS technology. There is a significant number of Web GIS applications which are open to the wider public including people without any GIS knowledge. The complexity of Web GIS interfaces, the risk and uncertainty they incorporate and the limited knowledge of non-experts in spatial data handling and GIS operations influence the perceived trustworthiness of these systems. Previous scholars, such as Monmonier (1996) recognised the importance of trust in map design, however there has been no research into how trust can be improved for Web GIS applications. Three studies were conducted in order to investigate what elements influence non-experts’ trust perceptions and how specific Web GIS trustee attributes should be designed in order to improve trust. The results not only demonstrate the importance of further trust research in the Web GIS context, but also show that trust can be improved through interface design, which is an ethical need in order to support non-experts’ trust assessments.

What path and how fast? The effect of flight time and path on user spatial understanding in map tour animations

ABSTRACT GIScience scholars have identified map tours as an important visualization type for communicating spatial information: map tours are animations where the virtual camera moves through space and are common on the web, mobile devices, and television. Understanding how to enhance their effectiveness is timely because of recent, growing interest in virtual reality and animated map presentation tools such as Esri Story Maps™ and Google Earth™ tours. Despite this popularity, little empirical evidence exists about how people learn from map tours and how they should best be designed to improve effectiveness. This research is aimed at answering that need. An empirical study is described, which was designed to understand how virtual camera speed, path, and dynamic tilting within a map tour influence subjects’ ability to develop survey knowledge. The results of the experiment show that paths encompassing overviews of the landscape improve the viewer’s ability to build up survey knowledge; that tilting appears to have a much weaker effect; and that combining fast speed and a difficult path within a map tour increases the viewer’s cognitive load.