Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
can actually edit data, while the others are aware of modifications, but can
only leave comments. Shengjun and Yuan's system allows several users to
manage different entities on the vector data (Shengjun, Yuan 2008) with a
versioning system to keep track of data submission which avoids duplica-
tions of work by keeping every participant synced.
Remote groupware GIS (such as ArcGIS Server) is useful for distant users
and is increasingly widespread. However, in many cases, collaborative
work is performed in a single room by a co-located team. While remote
groupware GIS helps users to maintain current and historical GIS data, it
does not fully exploit the human ability to communicate and to interact to-
gether.
2.2 Co-located GIS
Collaborative work on geographic information is quite natural as shown in
situations where paper maps are deployed on a table during a meeting. Par-
ticipants are then located face to face around the paper map. They can
communicate, make annotations, take decisions and are constantly aware
of other people's actions, While paper maps favor collaboration, they do
not offer the high level of interactivity provided by GIS (NB: some at-
tempts have however been made to augment paper maps with digital pens
(Yeh et al. 2006)).
The goal of co-located groupware GIS is both to provide a high-level of
interactivity with numerous and powerful features but also to allow users
to collaborate easily and efficiently. This requires re-thinking the tradi-
tional way of interacting, i.e. by using a PC with a relatively small screen,
a mouse and a keyboard. Large interactive surfaces are now commercially
available (DiamondTouch, Surface, Immersion). They offer several advan-
tages (Gutwin et al. 1996) that are quite useful for GIS (especially for
crisis or emergency risk management) such as:
•
Informal awareness: knowing who is around and what he/she is doing,
•
Social awareness: keeping track of communicational information about
others,
•
Group structural awareness: information about people's roles, responsi-
bilities or status,
•
Workspace awareness: the perspective of one worker observ-
ing/interacting with others.
