A Collaborative User-Centered Approach to Fine-Tune Geospatial Database Design

Abstract. The Geographical Information System (GIS) design process usually involves experts in specific application domains (e.g. geology and forestry). These experts are responsible for capturing user needs, and communicating them to GIS developers. However, as the community of users is not directly involved in the design process, these experts may miss some user intentions. This may lead to ill-defined requirements and ultimately in higher risks of geospatial data misuse. In this paper, we present a collaborative user-centered approach in the design process that aims at improving requirements collection and description through a web 2.0 philosophy of having a more active involvement of users. The approach consists of 1) analyzing the role users could play based on requirement engineering guidelines, and 2) allowing users to iteratively describe their intentions of data usage in given contexts