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Modeling and Communicating the Conceptual Intent of Geo-Analytical Tasks for Human-GIS Interaction

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Abstract

One of the fundamental issues of geographical information science is to design GIS interfaces and functionalities in a way that is easy to understand, teach, and use. Unfortunately, current geographical information systems (including ArcGIS) remains very difficult to use as spatial analysis tools, because they organize and expose functionalities according to GIS data structures and processing algorithms. As a result, GIS interfaces are conceptually confusing, cognitively complex, and semantically disconnected from the way human reason about spatial analytical activities. In this article, we propose an approach that structures GIS analytical functions based on the notion of “analytical intent”. We describe an experiment that replaces ArcGIS desktop interface with a conversational interface, to enable mixed-initiative user-system interactions at the level of analytical intentions. We initially focus on the subset of GIS functions that are relevant to “finding what's inside” as described by Mitchell, but the general principles apply to other types of spatial analysis. This work demonstrates the feasibility of delegating some spatial thinking tasks to computational agents, and also raises future research questions that are key to building a better theory of spatial thinking with GIS.

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... The most common geographic sources are OpenStreetMap (Bartie et al., 2018;Janarthanam et al., 2012) and Ordnance Survey (Bartie et al., 2018). Usage of widely employed geospatial tools, frameworks, and spatial databases (e.g., PostGIS) is also residual: SpaceBook (Bartie et al., 2018) utilizes PostGIS and the pgRouting library for outdoor navigation and routing guidance, and CAGA (Cai et al., 2013), whose authors employ ArcGIS to support training in spatial analysis operators. Overall, even though multiple GIS tools (ArcGIS or QGIS, among others) have matured over the years to integrate seamlessly with mobile and web platforms, almost none of the papers reviewed take advantage of them. ...
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... sification in the development of virtual assistants in conjunction with user positioning in which tourism and recommendation are central, since both together account for two-thirds of the papers in the first group (18/27, 67%).A third application domain is education(Cai, Yu, & Chen, 2013;Doumanis & Smith, 2015;Eiris-Pereira & Gheisari, 2018;Klopfenstein, Delpriori, Paolini, & Bogliolo, 2018b), often combined with entertainment or gamified aspects(Doumanis & Smith, 2015;Klopfenstein et al., 2018b). The use of geoinformation resources is varied, ranging from space-time immersion in a building information modeling (BIM) environment (seeLiu et al., 2017 for a general description of BIM in geospatial scenarios) to improved communication skills in a construction scenario(Eiris-Pereira & Gheisari, 2018), to better understanding the concepts around spatial operations(Cai et al., 2013), ...
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