research-article

A situated cognition aware approach to the design of information retrieval systems for geospatial data

Authors:

Néna Roa-Seiler,

Grégory LeplâtreAuthors Info & Claims

ECCE '12: Proceedings of the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

Pages 168 - 172

https://doi.org/10.1145/2448136.2448172

Published: 28 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Motivation -- To improve the process of information retrieval (IR), specifically for geospatial data, by accounting for the natural processes of situated cognition where knowledge is a product of both action and context.

Research approach -- To focus on a specific topic (Mexican history), evaluate the limitations of existing approaches and design/implement a new system that overcomes these limitations.

Findings/Design -- As the theory situated cognition stipulates-all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. It was found that the knowledge produced by information retrieval can be situated in the activity of exploring search results and bound to the context of geographic location (specifically, place names). In the design of our new application this made it important to allow the user to be able to have place-names for towns and cities visible throughout the search process.

Research limitations/Implications -- Tests were only undertaken with Mexicans living in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca with data about Mexican events, hence results may be culturally specific or specific to users from countries with a particular geography.

Originality/Value -- The results of this research should be of interest to designers of interactive maps and those who attempting to apply the theory of situated cognition to application design.

Take away message -- Taking account for the context in which users want to view the results of searches can improve the usability of IR applications. Specifically, this is demonstrated for geographic data where maintaining the visibility of place-names makes results generally more valuable.

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Cited By

Craig PSeiler NCervantes A(2014)Animated Geo-temporal Clusters for Exploratory Search in Event Data Document Collections2014 18th International Conference on Information Visualisation10.1109/IV.2014.69(157-163)Online publication date: Jul-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/IV.2014.69
Finn MThunen D(2013)Recent literature in cartography and geographic information scienceCartography and Geographic Information Science10.1080/15230406.2013.81920140:4(363-381)Online publication date: Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2013.819201

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ECCE '12: Proceedings of the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

August 2012

224 pages

ISBN:9781450317863

DOI:10.1145/2448136

General Chairs:
Phil Turner
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
,
Susan Turner
Edinburgh Napier University, UK

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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EACE: European Association for Cognitive Ergonomics
Edinburgh Napier University, UK: Edinburgh Napier University, UK

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 August 2012

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ECCE '12

Sponsor:

EACE
Edinburgh Napier University, UK

ECCE '12: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

August 28 - 31, 2012

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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Cited By

Craig PSeiler NCervantes A(2014)Animated Geo-temporal Clusters for Exploratory Search in Event Data Document Collections2014 18th International Conference on Information Visualisation10.1109/IV.2014.69(157-163)Online publication date: Jul-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/IV.2014.69
Finn MThunen D(2013)Recent literature in cartography and geographic information scienceCartography and Geographic Information Science10.1080/15230406.2013.81920140:4(363-381)Online publication date: Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2013.819201

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