Research: GeoUsers

GeoUsers: user-centred research

Our research aims to get inside the heads of people wherever geography plays a part in what they do, and determine what, where, when and how geographical information (GI) is important to them.

The challenge

As a provider of GI it is important for our future to understand people’s real-world needs and tasks – from persons in everyday life to those in industry and government. Each has their view of the world, depending on what they are doing, what problems they are trying to solve, what decisions they need to make. These need to be understood so as to provide information that is useful and usable to many different people. But how do we approach this?

Approach

Our work underpins Research activities with end-user-focused research. This enables better decision making for future Ordnance Survey processes, data, products and services, ultimately benefiting our customers.

The GeoUsers team looks at real-world uses and needs for GI, using research approaches from areas such as social technology, user-centred design, psychology and cognitive science. These approaches are used to inform projects across Research from semi-automated data capture to semantic and database modelling.

Benefits

GeoUsers research allows us to:

Identify future priorities for data capture and update, to meet user needs for content and quality.
Make those data capture and update processes work better, by building them to complement and enhance our staff's capabilities.
Determine future user needs for GI content and quality, for future data modelling.
Help make our data more understandable to its end-users by understanding their semantics and cognitive models.
Move towards predictive modelling of user needs in the future, allowing us to ensure that the right information is given in the right context at the right time.
Help Ordnance Survey to further improve its customer focus.
Position Ordnance Survey as a thought leader on end-user issues in the GI industry and its user communities.

Current projects

Photogrammetry user work: understanding the human processes involved in working with aerial imagery. This includes studying and modelling users' visual attention, cognition and real-world task activities. We're working on this with the Remote sensing team.

Ground survey user work: examining the real-world context of use of Ordnance Survey's own surveyors, when out in the field, to help us define future solutions to aid their work. We're working on this with the Terrestrial based data capture team.

Future Users: researching the likely future information needs of some key Ordnance Survey customers, to help define the future database and its underlying semantics. We're working on this with the Data modelling and Semantic reference systems teams.

Cognitive models: studying and modelling the cognitive processes of map use tasks, and of human semantic memory and categorisation when related to geographic ontologies. Some of this involves work with the Semantic reference systems team.

Collaborations

We are also involved in many types of collaboration. These can help us to 'fill in the picture' of what people in many situations(including ordinary consumers and people with special needs) will need from geographic information in the future. Here are some of them:

FUTURES (Transport) | LBS4All | Mobile Bristol | ORCHEStrA

Tactile inkjet mapping project | Urban Tapestries | Valued LBS | Vivacity 2020

Publications

As part of our Research programme, we organise and sponsor occasional workshops tackling current research issues in geographical information. One such workshop, jointly organised by Ordnance Survey Research and the University of Leeds, focussed on ontologies for geographical information. If you would like to download a report of this workshop or self extracting zip file of the incorporated papers and presentations from the participants, please click on the appropriate link below:

View/download the report (PDF 227 Kb) | View/download the papers and presentations (zip 7.9 Mb)