Involving the Expert in the Delivery of Environmental Information from the Web

Abstract

Automatic provision of accurate user need- and profile-tailored environmental information is of increasing demand. However, it is a challenging task with many facets. Among them is the difficulty to compile and cast into a formal representation all the expert knowledge needed to accurately and exhaustively acquire, assess and process the data in order to be able to reliably judge their relevance to the user and to produce an adequate summary and recommendations. Studies in Human-Computer Interaction show that both the satisfaction of the users with an application and the objective performance of a service increases if the users (in particular, experts) are assigned an active role in the system. Based on this insight, we propose a largely interactive environmental information acquisition and generation framework. The PESCaDO service involves the experts in four central tasks: (i) determination of criteria for the search of environmental nodes in the web; (ii) assessment of the relevance of the identified nodes; (iii) assessment of the quality of the data provided by the nodes, and (iv) selection of the content to be communicated to the user. Quantitative evaluations and user trials show that the performance of the system is good and the satisfaction with the service is high.