Background

Geoportals serve the purpose of providing access to geodata and geo-webservices in a context ranging from local to global level. Examples are the Dutch National SDI (PDOK) (https://www.pdok.nl/en), the European INSPIRE (geoportal http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/) and the portal of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) (www.geoportal.org/). Despite the well-intended user-driven design of these portals, they often fall short in providing the user with the appropriate information on the usage of the data and services. This can include the representation of good practice workflows, as examples of using the data and/or services. Recently, initiatives have been taken to improve the portals with user-driven labels, see GeoViQua (2016) and Nuest & Lush (2015), but they have not yet included user generated content in an interactive way as it is common in other domains such as multimedia (e.g., Amazon.com) and the travel industry (e.g., Tripadvisor, booking.com).

Tasks

In this research you will first study a few selected geoportals and identify their strengths and weaknesses in connection with user requirements. Then you will study ways to improve such geoportals with recommendation parameters, based on a review system similar to Tripadvisor (with bubble rating for different categories, similar, but not the same as hotel star rating), and others like Yelp and Airbnb. Your use case will be based on the AfriAllience project (see IHE 2016) which uses three types of data: satellite images, in-situ sensor data and crowd-sourced data. You will identify parameters of recommendation, such as example workflows in which the data or operation can be used, and quality indicators such as service uptime and data completeness. By using existing web tools, you will build and test a small prototype which contains a few services from your use case, together with their ratings, which are based on your method.

Expected results

Your MSc project will result in a tested prototype web application and an MSc thesis that reports on the design and implementation of the prototype.