Towards open geo-information science; Assessing academic user involvement in portal development and its effect on their usage and perceived satisfaction

Abstract

Since the beginning of the geographic information (GI) sharing efforts and the creation of the firsts spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), organizational and technological constraints have been identified as the cause of not reaching the expected results regarding use and re-use of GI. Now, with the organizational framework already settled and with the capabilities offered by the web 2.0 and the eruption of web services, stabilising the use criteria and need for the different type of users has become the biggest challenge. The trend in current SDIs is to involve the user more in GI, looking to better satisfy their needs. This change in perspective from a provider to a user perspective demands a corresponding change in assessment methodologies of the different components, foremost those that enable interaction between user and data, such as the portal, in which the thesis is focused. The new methodology has to consider not only the end-product approach but also the participation approach. The thesis intends to help bridge this gap by designing a quantifiable methodology that considers both approaches, so that the relationship between the two of them can be studied. To this end, indicators for each approach were selected and a survey was carried out among a specific user group, the academic community. Two portals were studied through the survey, Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) portal and European Data Portal (EDP).