Author(s): Xuan Zhu; Arthur E. Mynett

Linked Author(s): Arthur Mynett

Keywords: User interface; Decision support system; Water resource management; Spatial knowledge retrieval

Abstract: User interface is one of the most important factors to evaluate system's usability and also the most crucial aspects of decision support systems. A good user interface for decision support systems should clarify the requirements from different stakeholders and make the right response. There are two kinds of user interface: technical/model interface (TUI) for technical background people and public user interface (PUI) for common people. TUI should understand and communicate with different databases from different models and display the integrated results in time series. PUI focuses on the visualization method for advancing the users' experience that assists common people to generate technical knowledge in a short time. In water resource management, lots of complex phenomena need to be simulated and represented in computer-based systems, such as the impact of climate change which requires the user interface to elaborate different scenarios, costbenefit analysis and indicators representations, i.e. flooding, hydropower, drought, biodiversity, fish productivity and so on. In this paper, we intend to analyze the different stakeholders' expectations in the water resource management alternatives which are mainly spatially variable. Therefore, more attention is needed into the spatial knowledge retrieval process.

DOI:

Year: 2009