Eoin Mac Aoidh

Personalization in adaptive and interactive GIS

With continuous increase of available online spatial data, requirements for the adaptation of spatial content to users context becomes increasingly important. Location-based services (LBS) deliver to the user information specific to a given location preferably using mobile devices. Personalizing the information provided to the user to take into account her/his information preferences and current location, the problem of inundating the user with irrelevant information is avoided. The research presented in this paper introduces an approach which implicitly monitors the users activity and generates a user profile reflecting her/his information preferences based on the interactions of the user with the system, and her/his physical location and movements. The system recognizes the user profile and adapts accordingly both to provide suitable information, and to prioritize the functionality appropriate to the users current context.

Analysis of implicit interest indicators for spatial data

Information overload is a pervasive problem in many application domains. One way of addressing this problem is to create user profiles that filter out irrelevant information while presenting the users with information matching their interests. This approach has not been widely exploited in GIS. In our spatial application, we log user interactions, and implicitly infer their interests from this information to generate a user interest model. In particular, mouse movements and map browsing behaviour are analysed. Experiments presented in this paper examine the accuracy of implicitly determined spatial interests. Personalisation techniques can subsequently be applied to provide users with the most relevant information with regard to their interests.

Towards dynamic behavior-based profiling for reducing spatial information overload in map browsing activity

The quantity of available detailed spatial content over the Web is continually growing. This leads to the problems of information overload and lengthy map download and render times. In order to address these problems in an effective and unobtrusive manner, the available content must be implicitly filtered and prioritized according to the user’s interests. Personalization of the user’s map elides less relevant information and prioritizes relevant information. The authors previously introduced a novel technique for detailed behavior-based spatial profiling. This article provides an analysis of the technique while exploring the properties of user interactions with a typical Web-based map browsing system. A technique for the automatic identification of specific interaction patterns is introduced and explored in a bid to improve current behavior-based map personalization techniques. The goal of this work is to move towards real-time profiling to support spatial dataset personalization, thus improving the user experience by reducing information overload.

Personalised multimodal interfaces for mobile geographic information systems

HCI in GIS is complicated by information overload and inappropriately designed user interfaces considering the task at hand. Implicit user profiling makes it possible to personalise both the data displayed by the GIS, and the interface used to display this data. The advance of mobile computing in recent years has put a great demand on mobile GIS to be made more efficient and user-friendly, as GIS are best experienced in the field. While operating in the field, it is quite conceivable that one’s hands would be otherwise occupied, thus the advancement of a multimodal system is imperative for field operation. This doctoral consortium paper addresses the personalisation of the HCI with such a mobile GIS.