A Mining Approach to Evaluate Geoportals Usability

A geoportal is a basic component of a spatial data infrastructure, used for searching, viewing, and downloading spatial data and services. It can be considered as a web application acting as an access point to the shared geographic information, being the place where distributed geographic data and services can be discovered. A geoportal offers the opportunity for different type of organizations to make their data and services accessible for the whole community of internet users and geoportals usability is considered a key concept. From the organizations point of view, usability is related to how the geoportal can support people to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently. From the end-users' point of view, usability concerns to how a geoportal is perceived, in a satisfying manner, to support users tasks. In this paper we present a mining approach to discover patterns related to geoportals usability evaluation. A framework is proposed based on several data sources in order to identify geoportals strengths and weaknesses affecting usability. The requirements emerging and its implications are analyzed. A geoportal evaluation case study is presented, performing web server logs analysis and System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire experimental data analysis applying factor analysis and association rules.