Abstract
With the wide use of web technologies, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and cloud computing, more and more geographical information systems are served as GIServices. Under such circumstance, quality of geographic information services (QoGIS) has emerged as an important research topic of geoinformatics. However, it is not easy to understand the field since QoGIS has no formal standards, which is not only in regard to server-side performance and capabilities, but is also related with the quality of experience (QoE) during user interaction with GIServices. In this paper, we compare quality of service (QoS) and QoGIS research to understand the uniqueness of QoGIS. A conceptual framework is proposed to organize and interpret QoGIS research from the perspective of quality modeling, acquisition, and application, and we discuss the status, limitations, and future directions of this area. Overall, our analysis shows that new quality metrics will evolve from existing metrics to match the needs in concrete QoGIS applications, and user preferences need to be considered in quality modeling for GIServices. We discuss three approaches for the provision of QoGIS information and find that user feedback mining is an important supplementary source of quality information. Gaps between QoS and QoGIS research suggest that the GIService performance enhancement must not only consider the unique features of spatial data models and algorithms, but also system architecture, deployment, and user spatiotemporal access behaviors. Advanced service selection algorithms must be introduced to tackle the quality optimization problems of geoprocessing workflow planning. Moreover, a QoGIS-aware GIServices framework must be established to facilitate and ensure GISerivce discovery and interaction. We believe this bibliographic review provides a helpful guide for GIS researchers.
Highlights
Quality issues affect overall user experiences significantly when interacting with GIServices in a distributed computing environment, especially in the era of spatial cloud computing [1].According to definition in the research work [2,3,4,5], geographic information services (GIServices) refer to any applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) or application programming interfaces (APIs) that serve the end-users for various needs for manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing geographical data through the Internet using client-server (C/S) or browser-server (B/S) modes
Famous examples include Google maps and location-based services, ArcGIS online, Geospatial data portals like Data.gov, and Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) like OpenStreetMap (OSM) in the forms of mobile-based, desktop-based, or web-based applications
Comparing with traditional desktop-based geographical information systems, GIServices experience a more complicated runtime environment, such as a mutable network condition, loosely-couple software architecture, and massive and ever-changing concurrent requests of end-users, which makes the guarantee of quality of service (QoS) and user-experiences crucial
Summary
Quality issues affect overall user experiences significantly when interacting with GIServices in a distributed computing environment, especially in the era of spatial cloud computing [1]. In addition to software quality and data quality, user experience is an important quality measurement, especially for the GIServices with GUIs and high human computer interaction (HCI) and geo-visualization demands Terms such as usability, readability, immersion, and illustration are linked to QoGIS research. This research provides a very large picture to outline the QoGIS concepts from different aspects of quality issues that involve GIServices, but the topics and terminologies are becoming very broad. This semantic confusion and the divergent reference sources make it difficult to identify literature related to QoGIS. We obtained 242 QoGIS records and 1002 QoS records
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