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Description:
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Abstract
Crises are often complex, geographical scale problems that require professionals to work in teams while dealing with a large amount
of geographic information for decision making. However, current geospatial technologies do not directly support group entities
working with geographic information–they impede rather than facilitate human-human collaborations and communication. Towards
the goal of making GIS “collaboration-friendly,” this paper explores the potentials of extending distributed GIS with groupware
and intelligent communication agents to support geo-collaborative crisis management by teams. Members of such a team are often
geographically distributed and play different roles. In addition to the architectural choice, special attention was given to the
computational approach to enable collaborative geographic information dialogues in spatial decision-making contexts. Collaboration
requires representation and reasoning on a team mental model, which must be constructed from dialogue contexts and shared
knowledge. An implementation of an intelligent, multimodal, multi-user geographic information environment, called GCCM_Connect,
is presented as a proof-of-concept for the proposed architecture.
Keywords
geo-collaboration, distributed GIS, groupware, crisis management
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