1. Introduction to the guidelines  
  
Geographic Information (GI) is a complex, rapidly growing and important part of the information society. New Geographic Information technologies are developing rapidly. The great advantage of GI is that it has the capability of summing up and visualising graphically what vast amounts of data are trying to tell you about the relationship between various phenomena on the Earth surface (such as the relation between climate and certain health risks). There are many applications in international, national and local government, business and research, and in various commercial sectors. Geographic Information is important because of its value for planning, land management, marketing studies, environment, renewable energy resources, emergency services, health care, political analysis and many other uses (GI2000). 

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are tools for the management of geographic information, for spatial analysis and visualization of this information. GIS are complex yet general purpose tools, serving many types of users, but a frequently stated problem is that this complex functionality is not accessible to end-users in administration, planning, decision making and other work domains because the technology has been developed for technical experts. Due to ergonomic deficits todays GIS user interfaces are not easy to use and require much time to learn. Because task performance with GIS imposes high workload on users the results may not be as optimal as required.   

The quality of GIS user interfaces is a key-factor for efficiency and effectiveness of GIS use, for user satisfaction, and therefore for GIS diffusion. This quality must be improved for end-users, especially since the technology is becoming more inexpensive and is therefore reaching more, normally non-expert, users within the general public.   

A key issue in GIS application development is the design of user-system interaction. However, the needs and requirements of real GIS users - a prerequisite for good user interface design - are not taken into account to a satisfactory degree for the development of GIS applications.