Evaluation of a Provenance Management Tool for Immersive Virtual Fieldwork

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a provenance management tool for immersive virtual fieldwork in geosciences, focusing on its usability and usefulness in recording research workflows during virtual geospatial data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces and assesses a Digital Lab Book tool designed to improve reproducibility by recording interactions and annotations in immersive virtual environments.

Findings

Participants found the DLB useful and easy to use.

Perceived ease of use was higher in immersive settings.

No significant differences in usage patterns between groups.

Abstract

Ensuring reproducibility of research is an integral part of good scientific practice. One way to support this is through provenance: information about research workflows from data gathering to researchers' sensemaking processes leading to published results. This is highly important in disciplines such as geosciences, where researchers use software for interactive and immersive visualizations of geospatial data, doing virtual measurements in simulated fieldwork on 3D models. We evaluated a provenance management tool, which allows recording of interactions with a virtual fieldwork tool and annotating different states of the visualization. The user study investigated how researchers used this Digital Lab Book (DLB) and whether perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness differed between groups in immersive or non-immersive settings. Participants perceived the DLB as both useful and easy to use. While there were indications of differences in perceived ease of use (higher for immersive setting), usage patterns showed no significant group differences.