Data usability from an end-user perspective: assessing contextual quality through geospatial analysis

The availability of geographical data has increased hugely in recent years, partly due to web-based developments (such as Google Earth) and crowdsourced mapping products (such as OpenStreetMap). Although there has been considerable research in the field of GIS-based usability, the majority of studies to date approach usability from the perspective of software development in areas such as computer interface design and testing, visualisation and cognition, and in aspects of device design (Hunter et al, 2003). Much of the literature on the usability of spatial data has been concerned with conceptual or theoretical frameworks in relation to concepts such as ‘fitness for purpose’ (Josselin, 2003 and Wachowicz and Hunter, 2003). There has been some recent research concerned with applying usability concepts to real-life applications (e.g. Brown et al, 2012) and with examining the implications of data quality in relation to the application of crowd sourced data (Haklay, 2010). However, very few studies to date have been concerned with evaluating the use and quality of different sources of spatially referenced data in relation to specific GIS-based tasks. With the ongoing trend towards the use of open source GIS, and with the increasing amounts of freely available data through initiatives such as data.gov.uk, there is an urgent need to examine the usability of data sources in different contexts which draw on their application in a range of GIS-based analytical tasks.