Computer-human interaction issues when integrating qualitative spatial reasoning into geographic information systems

  • Authors:

  • Carl P. L. Schultz;Hans W. Guesgen;Robert Amor

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Auckland;The University of Auckland;The University of Auckland

  • Venue:
  • CHINZ '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand chapter's international conference on Computer-human interaction: design centered HCI
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

To allow the immense volume of spatial data currently available to be used effectively, people need intelligent query tools that are simple and intuitive. Standard query tools have a number of serious usability limitations, as they often rely solely on numerical approaches when dealing with spatial information. The qualitative reasoning community has addressed this issue, by providing powerful formalisms based on the way that humans deal with spatial information, however, integrating these methods into numerical systems raises a number of new Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) problems. This paper addresses three key CHI challenges when combining qualitative and numerical methods: (1) managing the subjective, ambiguous nature of qualitative terms, (2) providing a powerful, yet simple query system, and (3) effectively visualising a complex, fuzzy qualitative query solution. A qualitative GIS called TreeSap is presented, which demonstrates that, with the use of CHI principles, query tools can be both powerful and accessible to non-expert users.