Web-based GIS system for prompted recall of GPS-assisted personal travel surveys: System development and experimental study

The advancement of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies over the past decade has offered an opportunity to develop interactive prompted recall personal travel/activity surveys over the Internet. This thesis project has resulted in the development of a new web-based software system to support emerging GPS-assisted personal travel surveys. The system, called TRIPS, enables data processing and data display, and it provides editing tools for prompted recall and post validation of GPS-based survey data. An experimental study was conducted using TRIPS to investigate various issues related to prompted recall surveys. This study showed the importance of providing human assistance to survey participants, particularly in tasks of activity/link editing. It also addressed other challenges associated with implementing TRIPS, including online data processing performance, multi-task handling, and browser variability.