Usability of Geospatial Metadata or Space-Time Matters

摘要

Little is known about how end users actually employ metadata to evaluate relevance of geospatial information objects (e.g., books, articles, government documents, maps, digital files, databases, and Web sites) and how this might differ from meeting non-geospatial information needs. While other studies have considered users in related contexts, we could not find any that applied well-established usability techniques to geospatial metadata usage for resolving geographic information needs. Here we discuss a recent usability study where we explored how users determine the relevance or potential value of geospatial information objects from metadata.