END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING
A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First Aid Domain
Daniela Fogli and Loredana Parasiliti Provenza
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università di Brescia, Via Branze 38, Brescia, Italy
Keywords: Collaborative web mapping, End-user development, Participatory design.
Abstract: This paper describes FirstAidMap, a collaborative web mapping system for creating, managing and sharing
territorial knowledge that can be useful in case of emergencies. The system arises from a design experience
we have carried out with representative end users belonging to an association for public assistance and first
aid. Volunteers of this association, and specifically ambulance drivers, need to know the characteristics of
the territory where they ensure their assistance, in order to reach a given place quickly and in a safe manner.
This knowledge is often tacit and usually distributed among the members of the association. Currently, to
cope with this problem, paper-based maps are the only means to spread and share knowledge within the
association; while training sessions are regularly taken to provide drivers with information about the
dangers existing in the territory and possible viability modifications. Representative volunteers participated
in the design of FirstAidMap and in the study of end-user development functionalities that could make all
volunteers able to contribute their own knowledge and share it with the other volunteers. The resulting
system engages and motivates users to participate in map shaping and, at the same time, reinforces the sense
of community and individual awareness.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the advent of the World Wide Web and
particularly of the participatory web, or Web 2.0,
(O’Really, 2006), maps are increasingly the venue
where people with different expertise can meet and
share knowledge for a specific purpose. As
suggested in (Marcante and Parasiliti Provenza
2008), web maps become social media, where users
are not only able to access and modify the
information associated with the map, but also to act
on the information added by other users, and thus
interact directly or indirectly with other people by
sharing and exchanging knowledge.
Additionally, more and more often web-based
maps are collaborative web mapping systems,
namely virtual spaces created by end users and
totally shaped at their hands. Collaborative web
mapping systems, such as Google Maps, allow users
to visually define spaces by enabling them to choose
what to map according to their own goals,
knowledge and practices. Thanks to the contribution
of new cartographic content, the resulting map
provides a living account of space as a social
product of individual embedded knowledge, daily
practices, and concerns (Giaccardi and Fogli, 2008).
In this sense, collaborative web mapping
systems, are intrinsically end-user development
(EUD) environments. As effectively summarized by
Fischer, EUD “is focused on the challenge of
allowing users of software systems who are not
primarily interested in software per se to modify,
extend, evolve, and create systems that fit their
needs” (Fischer, 2010). Indeed, collaborative web
mapping systems should encompass socio-technical
EUD mechanisms for supporting and encouraging
user participation in contributing content and
mapping space, especially when the map represents
a fundamental knowledge source sustaining users’
daily practices. This happens for example in
FirstAidMap, a collaborative web mapping system
we have designed and developed to satisfy the needs
of COSP (Centro Operativo Soccorso Pubblico), an
Italian non-profit association for public assistance
and first aid. FirstAidMap is a map-based system
that supports COSP volunteers in acquiring, creating
and sharing knowledge about the territory where
COSP ensures its assistance. This knowledge is
crucial for ambulance drivers to decide, in case of
emergencies, how to reach a given place quickly and
in a safe manner. However, knowledge of the
territory is often tacit and anyway distributed among
5
Fogli D. and Parasiliti Provenza L..
END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First Aid Domain.
DOI: 10.5220/0003066400050014
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2010), pages 5-14
ISBN: 978-989-8425-30-0
Copyright
c
 2010 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

COSP volunteers, depending on their interests,
attitudes, and experiences. FirstAidMap has thus
been conceived as a virtual space that users (COSP
volunteers) can directly shape and enrich, thus
actively building knowledge on the territory and
share it within the community they belong to. While
interacting with FirstAidMap to make this virtual
space evolve, users behave as end-user developers:
indeed, they modify ‘at use time’ the system to
satisfy their individual and collaborative needs.
Moreover, representative users participated ‘at
design time’ in the development of the system. Their
contribution was fundamental to create a system not
only easy to learn and to use, but also acceptable by
the COSP community and trustable by all its
members.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2
introduces the first aid domain. Section 3 describes
the participatory design activity carried out with
representative COSP volunteers; in particular, this
section discusses EUD needs emerged during design
sessions and the main ideas for satisfying these
needs. Section 4 describes the main characteristics
and functionalities of the resulting application.
Section 5 compares our work with related literature,
while Section 6 concludes the paper.
2 THE FIRST AID DOMAIN
COSP (Centro Operativo Soccorso Pubblico) is an
Italian non-profit association in Mazzano near
Brescia for public assistance and first aid
(http://www.cospmazzano.it). It includes about two
hundred volunteers working together to provide
initial care in case of medical emergencies. An
ambulance is available 24 hours a day at the COSP’s
offices. Volunteers are required to attend a certified
course for first aid training. Some of them are
trained to drive the ambulance and/or to act as
specialized rescuers assisting a nurse or an
emergency physician from the local hospital in the
provision of first aid. In addition to first aid service,
COSP association also offers assistance during sport
contexts and demonstrations as well as in
transporting patients between places of medical
treatment.
In this domain, navigator satellite systems, which
ambulances are usually equipped with, are not
considered sufficient and satisfactory by COSP
volunteers to carefully assist ambulance drivers and
the whole emergency crews in bringing medical care
to serious patients timely. Current navigator systems
do not take into account critical issues when
suggesting quickest paths to a place, such as roads
with humps or uneven road surfaces (really
dangerous in case of patients on board), road yards
in progress or weekly open-air markets causing
detours that can irreparably delay the provision of
first aid. Due to these limitations, COSP volunteers
do not rely too much on navigator systems, but they
rather prefer trusting in their knowledge and
expertise of the territory to decide how to reach a
given place quickly and in a safe manner.
Consequently, COSP volunteers go on using
traditional paper maps annotated with their
comments and notes; however, due to the rapid
topography updates and the perishable nature of
paper maps, quick ageing of such traditional maps
makes it difficult accessing up-to-date information.
It is thus evident that a web-based mapping
system, customized to the specific needs of the
intended user community, may represent an effective
solution to the problem at hand.
3 PARTICIPATORY DESIGN OF
FIRSTAIDMAP
In a first meeting we had with representative COSP
volunteers, they specifically asked for a map-based
software system that supports the training activity of
new ambulance drivers, who need to know the
characteristics of the region where COSP ensures its
assistance. Indeed, a high percentage of
interventions are performed in the neighbourhood of
Mazzano including about fifteen different villages;
as a consequence, drivers often find difficult
orienting themselves in this wide territory, especially
where interventions are rarely required or when rural
areas must be reached. Regular training sessions
thus provide volunteers with information about the
dangers existing in the territory, including temporary
holdups on the roads, and about the preferred roads
leading to different zones. A good and up-to-date a
priori knowledge of the territory is crucial for
guaranteeing fast interventions. The training activity
is usually performed by using traditional teaching
materials, typically by projecting and describing
PowerPoint
TM
slides with annotated maps of the
territory.
Therefore, a first goal was developing a web-
based mapping application, called FirstAidMap, to
support both instructors during training sessions and
drivers in self-training. The application has been
designed following a participatory approach
(Schuler and Namioka, 1993). Scenarios and use
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cases have been used to analyse system requirements
with the collaboration of representative users; mock-
ups have been prepared and progressively refined to
collect feedbacks and suggestions about the map
look-and-feel and its interaction possibilities. An
iterative approach based on the star-life cycle (Hix
and Hartson, 1993) has been adopted to develop the
application.
In the following, we first describe the basic
requirements identified at the beginning of the
project referred to the training activity, and then the
needs emerged during the development of the
application related to more sophisticated activities of
knowledge creation and sharing.
3.1 Requirements Analysis
The activities carried out by driver instructors, and
generally by COSP volunteers, are related to their
territory and require detailed and up-to-date
knowledge about the region where they offer first
aid assistance. Therefore, a digital map, commonly
used in different geographical systems should be the
main component of the FirstAidMap application: its
digital nature obviously increases the ability of
COSP volunteers to explore information on the map
with respect to the traditional paper-based version.
For the specific application domain, there is the need
of a digital map whose resolution level is high
enough to make roads, but also buildings and houses
of interest, recognizable. Additionally, the map
should be easily ‘explorable’ by users with limited
experience and competencies in information
technologies. Consequently, COSP volunteers
should easily zoom in and zoom out or pan to better
visualize a certain area of the territory.
A digital map, although up-to-date and with a
high resolution, does not contain all the information
the specific community requires about the territory.
From the analysis of the application domain, three
types of information have been recognized as crucial
for COSP work: zones, points of interests and
notifications. They are all necessary to guide
ambulance drivers to the place where medical
assistance is needed. In other terms, they are
information that enrich the geographic map with
semantics relevant for the COSP domain. Let us
consider in the following all the three types of
information.
A zone is an area on the map with common
characteristics; it groups together several points on
the map that satisfies some condition. An example is
a set of roads or neighbourhoods reachable through a
same ambulance route from the COSP offices. It is
described by a name and eventually by some users’
notes characterizing the area.
A point of interest, or briefly POI, is a place on
the map, i.e. a fixed and stable element on the
territory that acts as a reference point for ambulance
drivers and can help drivers to find their way to a
place. As in navigator satellite systems, a POI can be
a church, a sports ground, a square and so forth.
However, it can also be a more specific reference
point for an ambulance driver such as a bridge, a
dangerous road or other points of interest relevant
for first aid activities.
Finally, a notification is a notice about an alert
situation that can interfere with first aid
interventions. It aims to notify medical personnel of
emergency units about a critical condition occurring
in a given place and for a period of time that can
hinder the work of COSP volunteers, e.g. work in
progress in a specific area of interest or the
temporary modification of the road network of a
neighbourhood due to a demonstration. Differently
from the other types of information, a notification
usually has a limited validity (e.g. the closing of a
motorway tollbooth due to work in progress) or it
refers to an event occurring with a certain frequency
(e.g. the open-air market that takes place in a square
each Wednesday morning). Therefore, notifications
should be displayed on the map in the time frames
they are active.
All these types of information contribute to
support the activities of COSP volunteers. However,
they can be a lot of information which altogether can
confuse the user of the map. Therefore to avoid
information overload, there is the need to properly
organize such knowledge. A possible solution is
providing FirstAidMap users with all these
information organized in four different levels (see
Figure 1): (a) level 0 with the digital map (street,
satellite or hybrid map) retrieved through an
available web mapping service; (b) level 1 including
the zones created on the map; (c) level 2 with the
POIs; and finally (d) level 3 with the notifications
associated with the map. Moreover, COSP
volunteers should have the possibility to change the
map level easily, by choosing among a set of
available web mapping services. Finally, they should
be able to switch among the four information levels
independently, by disabling, if needed, those levels
they are not interested in.
END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First
Aid Domain
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Figure 1: FirstAidMap information levels.
3.2 EUD Needs
During the development of a first prototype
satisfying the requirements described above, further
discussions with representative users led to identify
new usage scenarios, beyond driver training.
Particularly, a new need emerged: let COSP
volunteers use the system also for simple
consultation to improve their knowledge of the
territory, and as a support tool while preparing an
emergency intervention to identify the
characteristics of the area around the ambulance
destination place.
In this new perspective of FirstAidMap usage,
user collaboration to map enrichment is crucial.
Therefore, we started to study how ‘to transform’
COSP volunteers from passive users into co-
designers of map content. This should have required
to provide users with proper tools to enrich the map
with significant and up-to-date information, along
with functionalities for filtering relevant content,
customize map visualization and monitoring users’
activities. Moreover, this should have to be achieved
without forcing COSP volunteers to become expert
neither in information technology nor in
cartography, as many commercial geographic
information systems require.
To face this problem, the ideas and tools
proposed in the end-user development field have
been considered. The network of Excellence on End-
User Development, which was funded by the
European Commission during 2002-2003, defined
EUD as “the set of methods, techniques, and tools
that allow users of software systems, who are acting
as non-professional software developers, at some
point to create or modify a software artifact”
(Lieberman et al., 2006). EUD leads to transfer to
end users part of the activities that are traditionally
performed by software developers, such as software
design, implementation, customization, and
adaptation ‘at use time’. Particularly, EUD research
focuses the attention on those people who use
software systems as part of their daily life or daily
work, but who are not interested in computers per se
(Cypher, 1993). They can be technicians, clerks,
analysts and managers who often need to “develop
software applications in support of organizational
tasks” (Brancheau and Brown, 1993), due to new
organizational, business and commercial
technologies.
The main goal of EUD is therefore studying and
developing techniques and applications for
“empowering users to develop and adapt systems
themselves” (Lieberman et al., 2006). However, the
level of complexity of these activities should be
appropriate to the users’ individual skills and
situations, and possibly allow them to easily move
up from less complex to more complex EUD
activities. In other words, a “gentle slope of
complexity” (Meyers et al., 1992) should be
guaranteed, meaning that big steps in complexity
should be avoided and a reasonable trade-off
between ease-of-use and functional complexity
should be always kept in the system. In this way,
EUD functionalities should be made available to
users progressively, without forcing them to learn
advanced functionalities soon. EUD functionalities
should not be intrusive nor distract users from their
primary task; at the same time, they should
encourage users in experimenting system adaptation
and modification, by requiring the same cognitive
effort necessary for using basic functionalities.
To integrate EUD tools in FirstAidMap, while
guaranteeing a gentle slope of complexity, the
classes of potential end-user developers have been
identified, and then the EUD functionalities the
system should offer have been designed. Next
subsection discusses these aspects.
3.3 End-User Developers Classification
To allow COSP volunteers to perform different
types of EUD activities in FirstAidMap, we started
analysing: (i) their current practices within the
application domain; (ii) their skills and interests in
information technologies; (iii) their motivations in
collaborating to knowledge sharing on the map.
This analysis has led us to identify different
classes of end-user developers and for each of them
we have designed a suitable interaction experience
with FirstAidMap. As described in the next section,
the result is a collaborative web mapping application
that can be effectively adopted within COSP domain
and in similar context. The classification of end-user
developers is based on the following assumptions,
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Figure 2: Map view environment.
which have been discussed and agreed upon during
participatory design with representative end users.
All COSP volunteers should be able to access
the map-based information (zones, POIs and
notifications) associated with the map to better know
their territory and real-time updates (e.g. detours,
hazards). Additionally, they may insert, in an easy
and immediate way, a new notification to quickly
point out a danger situation. To this end, COSP
volunteers should access the system easily without
any authentication mechanism. In this case, they
access the system as visitor users just to explore
current information on the map and eventually signal
a danger; they should not be allowed to perform
more advanced activities.
Some volunteers possibly would like to actively
contribute to the updating of map-based information
and, consequently, they should be able to create
and/or modify zones, POIs and notifications in
addition to access and explore the knowledge base
as simple visitors. To carry out these activities,
volunteers need to authenticate with the system,
acting as contributor users.
Finally, more active and experienced COSP
volunteers should be able to perform more advanced
EUD activities to let both the content and the whole
system evolve according to the COSP population’s
needs, thus acting as administrator users. An
administrator is a power user who manages user
profiles, system accesses and all the information
associated with the map (POIs, zones and
notifications). Furthermore s/he is responsible for
configuring the system according to the COSP
volunteers’ needs.
Furthermore, during a meeting with COSP
representative users, a new requirement emerged:
among COSP volunteers, ambulance drivers should
be required to access the map-based information in
FirstAidMap before each emergency intervention, in
order to check possible alert situations in the way to
the emergency site. To monitor drivers’ accesses to
the system, a role driver has thus been added. As a
visitor, a driver user can access the knowledge base,
visualize new notifications, and eventually insert
new ones, but s/he is required to authenticate to the
system to enable the log of his/her activities.
4 FirstAidMap
The resulting application supports EUD activities
allowing COSP volunteers to customize the
environment and its content, as well as shape what
they need. These activities can be categorized as
follows:
 Personalization of map visualization by
filtering the information available and
customizing the map appearance. These
END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First
Aid Domain
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activities span from choosing the type of map
displayed (road, satellite or hybrid) or the web
mapping service (Google Maps, Yahoo! or
Visual Maps) to selecting the information
levels to be shown;
 Creation and management of new content, by
adding a multimedia document and a marker
(a POI or a notification marker) or defining an
area (a zone icon) within the map;
 Modification of the type of content to be added
to the map and management of system
configuration and user profiles.
The application provides an authentication
procedure and, as a consequence, different
interaction modalities, according to the kind of end
user logged in the system. The tools for customizing
the map navigation and adding new content have
been grouped in a set of panels. Some of them can
be used also by simple visitor users who, even if not
logged, may interact with the navigation panel and
the panel for inserting new notifications. A separated
section can be accessed by administrator users: this
section does not support a direct interaction with the
map, like in the other modalities, but allows creating
new kinds of content, managing users, and
monitoring drivers activities.
4.1 Accessing as Visitor or Driver
Each visitor user can access FirstAidMap in a
consultation mode. In this mode, the user can
navigate the map and access content details (see
Figure 2). In particular, the user can interact with the
map by clicking on the zoom in/out and pan widgets
or using the mouse wheel and left button. S/he can
also select an icon on the map, so as a pop-up
window appears to display its textual details (in the
case at hand the pop-up associated with a
notification informs about the closing of a specific
square due to an open-air market occurring each
Sunday from January to December 2009).
On the right of the map there is a navigation panel to
allow the user to customize the map visualization by
selecting its type (road, hybrid or satellite map) and
the web mapping service (Google, Yahoo, Visual
Maps). S/he can also filter the map-related
information to be displayed (zones, POIs,
notifications) and look for a specific place in the
map by specifying its address or immediately points
to a relevant place from a list, such as the COSP’s
offices by choosing the “Sede” item.
Under the navigation panel on the right, there is a
notification management panel allowing the user to
insert notifications only. By selecting “Inserisci una
nuova notifica” (Insert a new notification), the
corresponding panel is enlarged to support the user
in inserting a new notification while the only
information level displayed on the map is that with
active notifications. This allows the user to focus
her/his attention on notifications. The visitor user
can thus enrich the map-based information by
adding a new notification marker on the map and
characterizing it through a name, a description, a
validity period, a frequency (all days or a given
week day) and a type that represents its gravity.
The same activities can be carried out with
FirstAidMap by driver users who logged in the
system. The only difference is the monitoring
activity performed by FirstAidMap transparently
with respect to the user; this activity, as required by
COSP, allows checking a posteriori if drivers
consulted the map before their emergency
interventions.
4.2 Accessing as Contributor
More advanced activities can be performed when the
user logs in the system as a contributor. In this case,
the map view environment is that shown in Figure 3.
As the reader can notice, a richer set of panels is
present on the right of the map. This set includes the
same navigation panel previously described, and
three panels to manage (i.e. insert, modify or delete)
zones, POIs and notifications, respectively. The
items in each panel can be selected by the user to
perform a specific action; the corresponding sub-
panel is thus expanded to show all the information
necessary to carry out the selected action. Only a
sub-panel, and thus only one functionality, can be
active at a time. This allows driving more clearly the
user during the interaction and reducing error
possibilities.
The panel for managing zones includes three
sub-panels devoted to zone insertion, zone
modification and zone deletion, respectively. By
selecting one of these sub-panels, the map is
automatically refreshed in order to enable the
visualization of the zone level only. This way, the
user should better understand the information level
where s/he is going to operate. Moreover, in this
state of the system, the interaction with the map is
different with respect to the interaction allowed by
the navigation panel: clicking and moving the mouse
pointer on the map in the navigation state determines
a dragging of the map and a visualization of a
different portion of the territory; whilst, a click on
the map in an insertion state leads to the creation of
a new point on the map. This permits to reduce
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Figure 3: Map view environment for contributors.
errors and to increase user performance while
inserting (or modifying or deleting) a content,
because in each system state only a limited number
of actions can be performed and only the widgets
necessary to perform those actions are visualized,
without overwhelming the user with too much
information and tools.
In the case of zone insertion, a sequence of clicks
on the map allows selecting the vertices of a
polygon, which is automatically created and adjusted
after each user click. A double-click allows
completing the polygon draw. Additional
information related to the zone, such as a name
identifying the zone and a detailed description, can
then be inserted by filling in the form that is
presented in a sub-panel. This form includes also
simple instructions that help a non-expert user in
perfoming the task.
The modification or deletion of a zone can be
activated by selecting first the corresponding sub-
panel of the zone manager panel, then by clicking on
a zone on the map. The shape or the position of the
zone can be modified by direct manipulation on the
map; while the data associated with the zone, which
are automatically loaded and visualized in a form,
can be changed by just editing them.
FirstAidMap behaves similarly also for managing
POIs and notifications. Particularly, for POI
insertion, the user can also choose the corresponding
icon to be visualized on the map by selecting the
POI type (church, soccer field, bridge, etc.).
4.3 Accessing as Administrator
As a member of the COSP staff, an administrator
user will not necessarily be an expert in system
administration; s/he will be a power user, with some
deeper knowledge in information technologies with
respect to the other volunteers. The administrator
user should therefore be supported in performing
administration activities by easy-to-use tools and
user-oriented terminology. For this reason, we
classify also administration activities within the
EUD activities supported by FirstAidMap.
An interesting EUD activity at the hands of an
administration user is concerned with the application
configuration. Figure 4 shows the page devoted to
this activity. At the top of the page the user can
select the base map to be loaded at the application
start. Then, s/he can manage the types of POIs and
notifications by defining new ones or changing the
existing ones. The administrator can define a new
type by inserting a name and selecting an icon from
those avalaible in a group of radio buttons. If the
user does not find a suitable icon, s/he can load a
new image on the system and this image will then be
added to the available icons. The types of POIs and
notifications already existing in the application are
shown as a list in the bottom part of the page; each
END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First
Aid Domain
11

Figure 4: Configuration section.
one is represented by its icon and name, whilst the
link “Modifica” (modify) allows the user to access
the tool for changing the icon or the name.
5 RELATED WORK
EUD techniques have been used for many years in
commercial software, such as macro recording in
word processors, formula composition in
spreadsheets or filter definition in e-mail clients.
However, on the one hand, they are far to be used
extensively by a large community of end users, and,
on the other hand, there exists the potential for
employing EUD techniques in many other
application domains and with different levels of
complexity (Fischer, 2010). Particularly, EUD-based
solutions are advocated in cooperative domains,
similar to that considered in this paper. For example,
in (Cabitza and Simone, 2009) an EUD approach is
proposed to facilitate document-mediated
cooperative work in the healthcare domain.
As far as the technical solutions are concerned,
component-based approaches for EUD are proposed
in the computer-supported cooperative work field
(Mørch et al., 2004). Myers et al. focus instead on
natural programming languages and environments
that permit people to program by expressing their
ideas in the same way they think about them (Myers
et al., 2004). Annotation mechanisms and visual
programming through direct manipulation are the
main EUD techniques implemented in software
shaping workshops (Costabile et al., 2007). A
lightweight visual design paradigm is also proposed
in (Spahn and Wulf, 2009), where the approach
allows business users to create enterprise widgets.
Moving from domain-oriented systems to more
general web-based applications, the approach
presented in (Da Silva and Ginige, 2007) is based on
the definition of a meta-model of web applications
and a set of form-based tools that can be used by end
users to customize and shape their applications. A
form-based approach is also proposed in (Fogli,
2009), as a way to support the development of e-
government services on behalf of administrative
employees, who do not have any competences in
information technology and neither are interested in
acquiring them. Anslow and Rielhe (2008) propose
the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis,
which are regarded as a platform to support end
users not only in contributing content, but also in
performing computational tasks, such as the
development of business queries. In this line, it has
been observed that also mashup makers include
much support for EUD (Grammel and Storey, 2008),
which usually adopts a model based on composition.
In this work, we have capitalized on these
proposals by adopting direct manipulation and form-
based interaction as basic means to implement EUD
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functionalities in a collaborative web mapping
system.
Actually, other systems are available on the Web
having many similarities with ours. For example,
Google Maps enables users to create personalized
maps and share them with relatives and friends.
Particularly, users can create their own maps by
using place markers, shapes, and lines to define a
location, an entire area, or a path. However, the
interaction with tools for map personalization is
much more programmer-oriented than in our system,
with terminology and interaction style resulting to be
sometimes intimidating for our classes of users
(especially drivers and contributors).
Other systems, such as WikiMapia
(www.wikimapia.org) or OpenStreetMap
(www.openstreetmap.org) are more oriented toward
the creation of a social network rather than of a
virtual place where to accumulate and share
knowledge for a specific and common purpose.
WikiMapia allows registered users to select
interesting places by drawing polygons and add text
notes about the places, as well as images. Other
users can see places, read annotations and add
comments. Registered users can also vote for an
annotation. If the annotation has more than one vote
against it, it is deleted. This parameter, which
WikiMapia uses to control the correctness of
annotations, is a typical feature of social networks.
YourHistoryHere (www.yourhistoryhere.com) is
another map-based wiki based on the Google Maps
API. It is similar to WikiMapia, since it enables
users to mark a place with a flag and to add textual
annotations telling the history of the specific place.
Other logged users can comment on the history. In
all these examples, users who comment on or edit
annotations constitute informal groups, characterized
by common interests or common knowledge about a
same place.
With respect to such systems, FirstAidMap has
been designed in a participatory way in collaboration
with its intended users, and therefore functionalities
for knowledge creation and sharing are tailored to
users’ skills and experiences, and aimed at satisfying
the specific needs of the community. For example,
the notion of levels and different kinds of
information to be made available at users’ pace
emerged from the discussions with representative
users, as well as the distinctions between POIs and
notifications. We argue that these characteristics
may better sustain user participation in knowledge
creation and sharing, and thus increase the
usefulness and meaningfulness of the application.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The experience described in this paper highlights the
active role end users may play with respect to a
software system both ‘at design time’ and ‘at use
time’. However, while user-centred and participatory
design approaches are considered by HCI scholars as
consolidated and successful practices for interactive
system development, only in recent years end-user
development (EUD) has received an adequate
attention. Differently from participatory design,
EUD stresses the role of users as co-designers of
their systems ‘at use time’, and not only ‘at design
time’.
To support user participation during system
usage, Fischer and colleagues (2001) argue that
software systems should be designed as living
entities, which should be able to grow at the hands
of users as if they were seeds. FirstAidMap could be
regarded as a seed composed by a software system
(the technical component) and its users (the social
component). As a seed, both its components are able
to evolve. Actually, COSP volunteers not only
shape the technical environment and make it grow
by designing zones or adding POIs and notifications,
but they make their own community evolve. Indeed,
volunteers become aware of the importance of their
knowledge, and thus they become better observers
of the territory around them and more willing to
inform themselves about the potential dangers, in
order to share all the acquired information with the
other volunteers. Also the sense of community can
change as a consequence of these activities.
We argue that this model could be applied in all
those situations where: (i) a community exists or
may potentially exist; (ii) the knowledge is
distributed among community members; (iii)
knowledge changes and evolves in an unpredictable
and non-monotonic way; (iv) sharing knowledge
comes first than possessing knowledge per se.
To achieve these goals, the EUD tools we have
created for FirstAidMap are functionalities that
support user participation in collaborative web
mapping, and they have been studied to engage,
encourage and motivate users in contributing and
sharing their knowledge. In general, we argue that
both usability aspects and social issues should be
carefully considered when designing EUD systems
for knowledge accumulation and sharing.
FirstAidMap is developed as an evolutionary
prototype to explore the requirements of the COSP
community and verify the feasibility of a software
system addressing such requirements. At the
moment, heuristic usability evaluation and code
END-USER DEVELOPMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Collaborative Web Mapping Application in the First
Aid Domain
13

testing have been performed by two experts in
human-computer interaction and software
engineering. The usability problems emerged in this
preliminary evaluation have been solved and
programming bugs are being fixed. We are currently
organizing a systematic evaluation of the application
through an experiment with COSP volunteers.
As far as future work is concerned, we are
studying the integration in FirstAidMap of more
advanced EUD functionalities, such as the
possibility for users to create new information
levels. We are also re-engineering the application to
make it flexible enough to be easily adaptable to
other application domains. A portable version of
FirstAidMap to be used inside ambulances, endowed
with a real-time data updating based on a Global
Positioning System (GPS), is under study.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors wish to thank the volunteers of COSP–
Mazzano for their collaboration. We are also
grateful to Francesca Facchetti e Paolo Melchiori for
their contribution to the prototype design and
implementation. Finally, we would like to thank
Maddalena Germinario and Annamaria Percivalli for
the usability evaluation and code testing of the
version of the application presented in this paper.
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