Pavel Sedlak

Usability evaluation methods for spatial information visualisation: Case study: Evaluation of tourist maps

Many decisions are influenced by location. Geoinformation technologies together with digital data are today very often used to support spatially-oriented decisions. Another reliable way of spatial information presentation is represented by analogue maps. This contribution describes utilization of software engineering methods in cartography to evaluate and improve quality of maps. Authors have long experience with utilization of usability evaluation of Web based geographic information systems. They propose utilization of suitable methods to evaluate usability of analogue maps. Usability of analogue tourist maps of attractive areas of the Czech Republic was evaluated by means of proposed methods. Maps published by the most famous publishers in the Czech Republics, i. e. maps published by Kartografie Praha, a. s., SHOCart, spol. s r. o., Klub českých turistů o. s. and Geodézie On Line were evaluated. Usability User Testing and Heuristic Evaluation were used as methods for usability evaluation. The main results of case studies are briefly described in the paper. Results of one case study are processed by multi-criteria decision making methods. Benefits and weaknesses of used methods derived from author experience are stated in the end.

Use of Automatic Image Classification for Analysis of the Landscape, Case Study of Staré Jesenčany, the Czech Republic

The landscape is changing, mainly due to man. The changes in the landscape are increasingly important, so it is important to monitor these changes, mainly due to the use of resources in the country in the future. The article deals with the use of automatic classification of data from remote sensing to analyse the development of the landscape on the case study in the village Stare Jesencany, the Czech Republic.

Usability evaluation of Web-based GIS by means of a model

Spatial information is required by many users to support their decision-making. Application that provide spatial information may be quite complicated so evaluation of their usability is very important. Usability evaluation can help to improve their design or how to choose better application. Many various methods have been proposed. The paper describes a case study which uses combination of usability user testing and NGOMSL model to evaluate usability of chosen Web-based applications by means of calculating a utility. Case study shows that very similar results are obtained by both methods. Average time necessary for usability evaluation is shorter in the case of NGOMSL model.

Interlinking Opensource Geo-Spatial Datasets for Optimal Utility in Ranking

The joining of geospatial datasets is required to utilize the complete set of information available in each of them. There are many open source geospatial datasets available such as GeoNames, Open Street Map, Natural Earth and to get a comprehensive dataset with the union of all available information it is important that such datasets are linked optimally without redundancy or loss of information. Many of the geolocations on digital maps are not classified for importance because of the lack of additional information such as population or administrative level. A way to give an importance scale to the names is by linking the GeoNames to other datasets (OSM, natural earth). OpenStreetMap data provides a limited number of place classifications (such as city, town, village). For the best cartographic results we need classes that are a little more comprehensive about how they rank cities. The challenges faced include geometry searching, matching, buffer determination, local regional naming text inclusion and accuracy. This has been achieved by the current research work where presently GeoNames, Natural Earth and Open Street Map data tables have been merged with the union of all their attribute columns resulting in a complete geospatial dataset with place accuracy of atleast 95 % for any given country dataset. The data tables at global level consist of hundreds of thousands of rows with each row depicting a geolocation. The geometry, name and geo-id complete and fuzzy searching and matching around a buffer of 50 km took a minimum of 30 s to maximum 1 min in a commodity computer with 2 GHz, 2 GB memory, according to size and complexity of the query run for a country which could have a list of points ranging from a dozen to several hundreds. The future aim is to ultimately do this for global datasets to create an all-encompassing geodata bank having such information as administrative, political, ecological details from important databases as GAUL, SALB, GADM etc.