Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct a usability evaluation of governmental data portals and provide a list of best practices for improving stakeholders’ ability to discover, access, and reuse of these online information sources. Design/methodology/approach The developed methodology was based on the comprehensive literature review that resulted in a benchmarking framework of the most important criteria. A usability testing method was then applied with accordance to unique requirements of open data portals. This approach was demonstrated by using of a case study. Findings The main found weakness was a lack of support for active engagement of stakeholders. The list of best practices was introduced to improve the quality of these portals. This should help to improve the discoverability and facilitate the access to data sets in order to increase their reuse by stakeholders. Social implications The creation of appropriate open data portals aims to fulfill the principles of open government, i.e., to promote transparency and openness through the publication of government data, enhance the accountability of public officials and encourage public participation, collaboration, and cooperation of involved stakeholders. Originality/value This paper proposed a new approach for the usability evaluation of open data portals on national level from an ordinary citizen’s point of view and provided important insights on improving their quality regarding data discoverability, accessibility, and reusability.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to draw on evidence from computer-mediated transparency and examine the argument that open government data and national data infrastructures represented by open data portals can help in enhancing transparency by providing various relevant features and capabilities for stakeholders' interactions.Design/methodology/approachThe developed methodology consisted of a two-step strategy to investigate research questions. First, a web content analysis was conducted to identify the most common features and capabilities provided by existing national open data portals. The second step involved performing the Delphi process by surveying domain experts to measure the diversity of their opinions on this topic.FindingsIdentified features and capabilities were classified into categories and ranked according to their importance. By formalizing these feature-related transparency mechanisms through which stakeholders work with data sets we provided recommendations on how to incorporate them into designing and developing open data portals.Social implicationsThe creation of appropriate open data portals aims to fulfil the principles of open government and enables stakeholders to effectively engage in the policy and decision-making processes.Originality/valueBy analyzing existing national open data portals and validating the feature-related transparency mechanisms, this paper fills this gap in existing literature on designing and developing open data portals for transparency efforts.

Dependency of the majority of mankind activities on information and communication technologies in general and on geographic information is increasing rapidly. This is one of the reasons why usability of specialized software tools (GIS) belongs today to the top priorities of managers and users of information technologies. This requirement concerns geographic information systems in general but it principally concerns Web-based GIS sites because spatial data and tools for their utilization are nowadays in great demand by end-users too. Web-based GIS sites can provide an easy-to-use solution to the end users but they must be properly designed. Case study evaluating usability of three different Czech Web-based GIS applications by means of questionnaire-based usability user evaluation was done. Results are discussed and some recommendations how user interface of Web-based GIS should be designed, are concluded.

No abstract

In today's modern world, reliable automatic personal recognition is a crucial area of discussion, primarily because of the increased security risks. A large number of systems first require the recognition of a person before they can access their services. Biometric recognition can be used, which can be understood as automatic identification or automatic verification of persons based on physiological or behavioural characteristics. Examples of biometric characteristics may be the fingerprint, face, signature, hand geometry. There are many approaches, and each has its pros and cons. However, there is currently no current extensive research and evaluation of hand-based biometric systems. Given the userfriendliness of these systems and the needs of society, this article aims to compare different methods of biometric recognition based on hand, so that the article reduces the entry barrier into this area of research. Furthermore, the article aims to determine the research gap and suggest possible directions for research in the future.