The Relevance of Web Mapping Infrastructures in a Web Portal for Desktop and Mobile Devices: A Case Study

Abstract

There exists a lack of detailed empirical studies to assess the relevance of WebMapping applications. Despite this fact, it is quite common to note that importance and influence of WebMapping applications have increased over the last years. This paper presents the result of an empirical study to analyze the importance of a Desktop-WebMapping application for a gastronomic web 2.0 portal for the city of Osnabrück. An exploratory focus is to evaluate how often geospatial information (in a broader information context) from this web portal is used and how important the WebMapping applications are for the users of the web portal. Furthermore, it is evaluated which WebMapping functions (e.g. routing, queries, printing) are of relevance to the users and what the order of importance is for the provided functions. To-date, just a few mobile WebMapping applications for handheld devices exist. Consequently, for OsnaGo we developed a mobile WebMapping component that can be used with mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices to access the web portal (http://www.osnago-mobil.de). Development and user based evaluation is presented in this paper.