Applying visualization

techniques to develop

interfaces for educational

repositories: the case of

Organic.Lingua and VOA3R

David Martin-Moncunill, Salvador Sánchez, Alonso Paulo A. Gaona García, Nikolaos Marianos

Motivation

Most educational digital repositories include a

knowledge classification scheme.

The idea of using a visual interface to show and

navigate through these schemas, sounds promising.

Several digital repositories have implemented or are

considering to implement one.

This would require a big implementation effort

evaluate before starting to work.

Case Studies: Organic.Edunet &

Organic.Lingua

Organic.Edunet: a

multilingual federation of

learning repositories about

Organic Agriculture and

Agroecology.

Agrovoc thesaurus used

for knowledge

representation.

Organic.Lingua: improve

Organic.Edunet portal with

advanced language

services.

Case Studies: Organic.Edunet & Organic

Lingua Experiments OE: In-depth usability study involving different user profiles (2011).

Heuristic Analysis, thinking aloud protocol, interviews, benchmarks, focus groups, questionnaires.

OL: Pilot & Usability trials, Starting January 2013. Spanish Society for Ecological Agriculture.

Not included in the paper: France (March 2013- domain experts), Spain (April 2013 – IT profile), UK (April 2013 – General Public)

Case Studies: VOA3R

Facilitate the open sharing of scientific and scholarly research publications

and outcomes related to agriculture, aquaculture, food and environment.

Agrovoc thesaurus used for knowledge representation.

“Drag & Drop” interface to navigate and search.

Case Studies: VOA3R Experiments

Information gathered from VOA3R pilot & validation trials (>20).

Usability techniques such as thinking aloud, interviews or cognitive

walkthroughs.

These results are described and published as part of the project

deliverables.

Case Studies: Usability study of taxonomy-

visualization user interfaces in digital repositories

In-depth study for the analysis of the perception and interaction levels.

Obtain conclusions that would ultimately lead to development decisions and the

adaptation of user interfaces. (To be published)

The experiment analised the thematic-coverage of the Europeana digital library,

according to a mature and well known taxonomic structure the AAT thesaurus.

Results

Several usability problems were found for each visual interface.

Results (II)

Three key problems beyond the visual interfaces’ usability:

Utility -What are the benefits of using these kind of interfaces?

Learnability - Will I have to learn how to use the interfaces & basics of KOS?

KOS Usability – I don’t understand the classification scheme!

Utility

KOS Usability

Learnability

Conclusions

Visualization techniques could be a very helpful tool for learning /

educational repositories using KOS.

To reach this goal an important effort on the usability side must be

done .

There are 3 key problems that prevent users from widely adopting

them.

Making efforts trying to solve other usability problems in an

implemented interface will most probably be useless if these key

problems are not solved first.

THANKS!

David Martin-Moncunill (d.martin@edu.uah.es )

Salvador Sánchez Alonso (salvador.sanchez@uah.es )

Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá, Spain.

Paulo A. Gaona García (pagaonag@udistrital.edu.co )

Faculty of Engineering, Distrital University, Colombia.

Nikolaos Marianos (n.marianos@chios.aegean.gr )

Department of Shipping Trade and Transport, University of the Aegean,

Greece