A Comparative Study of Typing and Speech For Map Metadata Creation

Abstract. Metadata is key to effective knowledge organization, and designing user interfaces that maximize user performance and user experience during metadata creation would benefit several areas of GIScience. Yet, empirically-derived guidelines for user interfaces supporting GI-metadata creation are still scarce. As a step towards mitigating that gap, this work has implemented and evaluated a prototype that produces semantically-rich metadata for web maps via one of two input modalities: typing or speech. A controlled experiment (N=12) to investigate the merits of both modalities has revealed that (i) typing and speech were comparable as far as input duration time is concerned; and (ii) they received opposed ratings concerning their pragmatic and hedonic qualities. Combining both might thus be beneficial for GI-metadata creation user interfaces. The findings are useful to ongoing work on semantic enablement for spatial data infrastructure and note-taking during visual analytics.