Real-time collaborative GIS: A technological review

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Abstract

Collaborative Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) have become an important research area over the past two decades. This paper provides a critical review of the development of real-time CGIS, which is a branch under Collaborative GIS study. A real-time CGIS system provides a multi-user, real-time collaborative work environment, i.e., what you see is what I see (WYSIWIS), for spatial decision support and problem solving. The research about this kind of system has mainly focused on system architecture and modelling, collaborative awareness, concurrent control, collaborative behaviour modelling and other related key issues. The paper presents a two-stage historic development process of real-time CGIS, summarizes major research progress and representative developments by analysing their key technical issues, and based on the review discusses some research problems that need to be solved and some future research directions.

Introduction

Spatial decision making has increasingly become a multidisciplinary process, involving people with different types of expertise and in many cases from different locations. Since 1992, a growing body of research has emerged in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to support such group collaboration and to even encourage and promote more informed citizen involvement in various decision-making activities (Obermeyer, 1998). Among these efforts, an important area is on the design and development of collaborative GIS systems that support group-based sharing, exploration and interaction of geographical information for spatial planning and decision problems. Such collaborating systems, often termed as collaborative spatial decision-making systems, allow a group of people to work together with geospatial data over the Internet or corporate local area network (LAN)/wide area network (WAN), extranet.

GIS, as a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyse, manage, and present all types of geo-referenced data, has been widely used as a spatial decision support tool. However, the single-user interaction mode of traditional GIS limits the complexity of solvable spatial problems and the efficiency of problem solving. In reality, many spatial problems and decision-making tasks that involve geographic information require multiple users to work in collaboration to process and analyse geographic data. In the process of decision making and spatial problem solving, there is a trend of integrating real-time and collaboration, which has already become one of the crucial areas of research and development in GIS theory and applications (Armstrong, 1993, Balram and Dragićević, 2006). Terms such as “collaborative spatial decision-making” (NCGIA, 1996), “geographic collaboration” or GeoCollaboration in short (MacEachren and Brewer, 2004, Balram and Dragićević, 2008) and “collaborative GIS” (Balram and Dragićević, 2008, Chang and Li, 2013, Butt and Li, 2012), have emerged to represent this field of study.

On the other hand, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), as a research field studying the design, adoption and use of groupware technology, has long focused on understanding computer-mediated communication and collaboration using groupware which provides a set of software tools and technologies that facilitate group interaction (Coleman and Kbanna, 1995). Typical “non-spatial” groupware allows collaborators to work in a computer-supported virtual environment in either synchronous or asynchronous mode, depending on the arrangement of time and place of the use. For example, document-conferencing programs may offer support to synchronous collaboration in four different ways: whiteboarding, applications and data sharing, file transfer, and real-time text messaging (i.e., real-time chatting). To mimic traditional meetings, these document-conferencing programs are often integrated with an audio/video conferencing system.

Collaborative GIS (CGIS), not a well-defined and widely-accepted term, has historic links to CSCW-based groupware and spatial decision support systems. Built on CSCW concepts, a collaborative GIS system may possess a set of basic tools that permit: (1) shared view, control and object selection of geographical information; (2) annotation and mark-up of geographic (map) features with multimedia data in the form of text, graphics, photos, and audio/video clips; (3) interactive exploration of geographical data for spatial problems; and (4) awareness of other collaborators and their outcomes. Since the nature of collaborative GIS is to support group work, seamless integration of communication (e.g., email, real-time chatting, discussion forum and conferencing), and process coordination (e.g., workflow) tools will greatly improve collaboration processes. Depending on the application context, the system may also provide other tools. For example, in the context of spatial decision support, both decision-making (e.g., multi-criteria evaluation) and negotiation tools are deemed necessary. All these tools require efficient data access, integration and management as well as good mechanisms to handle outcomes from collaboration. While some of these tools are more generic to any collaborative GIS applications, some may be specific to a particular application. One of the efforts has therefore been on identifying which tools can be generalized and which tools are more application-specific. In the end, these tools may be developed gradually and categorized based on different GIS use cases to create a tool repository. This would need proper software specification frameworks, e.g., Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, to deal with platform compatibility issues and interfaces.

CGIS tools, similar to general groupware, may be classified into four categories based on their time synchronization and users’ locations (see Fig. 1): same timesame location, same timedifferent location, different timesame location, and different timedifferent location. While most CGIS falls into one or two of these categories, this paper focuses on “same time – different locations” tools, i.e., Real-time Collaborative Geographic Information System (RCGIS).

Early efforts focused on combining GIS with CSCW hardware systems and software (groupware), or at least applying CSCW concepts in developing collaborative GIS systems (see examples from Churcher and Churcher, 1999, Faber et al., 1997, Jankowski et al., 1997, Jones et al., 1997, MacEachren et al., 2001). These developments used either an existing commercial GIS system or in-house developed GIS viewer, and integrated it with a groupware system such as electronic meeting systems (EMS).

Distinctive from other CGIS systems, RCGIS seeks real-time, synchronized natural and harmonious interactions that are concurrent, responsive and flexible (Kanzawa et al., 2008, Luo et al., 2004, Shao et al., 2010). RCGIS focuses on providing an object-oriented, multi-user collaborative work environment, i.e., what you see is what I see (WYSIWIS), to achieve interaction and collaboration between stakeholders and professionals. It has applications in disaster and emergency response, e-government, resources management, data production, and collaborative mapping and spatial modelling (Cai, 2005, Cheng et al., 2012, Lu, 2004, Quinterot et al., 2005, Sun et al., 2009). RCGIS possesses features common to general real-time systems, and the ability for users from different domains to collaborate on solving spatial problems and making spatial decisions simultaneously from different locations. It provides decision-makers with a virtual interaction space to overcome space and time limitations. RCGIS shares not only geospatial data, but also users’ visual images and even their operating behaviours; it is therefore much more complicated to implement than asynchronous collaboration systems. RCGIS often involves supporting intensive discussions within a small group.

RCGIS has increasingly drawn attention of researchers in computer science, geographic information science, and urban planning, among other related fields. On one hand, we have seen increasing research and commercial interests in developing tools and applications that provide real-time collaborative methods for working with geospatial data. On the other hand, insufficient understanding of theories, designs and insights on related social issues pose challenges for researchers and developers to generate solid outcomes. This paper presents a review of the development of real-time collaborative GIS, aiming at not only mobilizing the study in this subject field but also providing an overview of historical background as well as state-of-the-art of the field. It begins with a brief history of RCGIS in Section 2, followed by detailed review of research on RCGIS in Section 3 and applications in Section 4. Section 5 discusses some open issues and proposes future works. Section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

A history of RCGIS development

The development of RCGIS has gone through stages starting from conceptualisation through development of tools and systems to exploration of different applications. From a research point of view and for the purpose of this review, we break down the whole development process into two overlapping phases: (1) conceptualisation and proof of concepts; and (2) theoretical frameworks and research methodology.

Main research and development work

A RCGIS system allows users (e.g., experts, stakeholders, decision makers, interested citizens, etc.) from different professional domains to simultaneously work together from different locations. It provides users with a shared, distributed, cooperative workspace. Over the past two decades, research work in this area has mainly focused on system development and integration, architecture design, concurrent control mechanisms, and collaborative awareness in shared environments.

RCGIS applications

Real-time collaborative GIS have been developed and used to support applications in many areas, with emergency response and disaster management as the mostly-studied area. Examples include school closure due to severe weather conditions using big board for shared situational awareness (Heard et al., 2014), civil public security (Siegel et al., 2008), community emergency planning (Schafer et al., 2007), RCGIS for radiological disaster management (Quinterot et al., 2005) and collaborative

Recommendation for further development

Research on RCGIS technologies has evolved from the initial phase to further research and development phase, and has increasingly drawn great attention of researchers in computer science, geographic information science, and urban planning, among other related fields. After initial conceptualization phase, the field has so far primarily been technology driven, i.e., developing and upgrading systems and tools using newly emerged information technology, hardware and software platforms. Less

Conclusions

Real-time, collaborative GIS is a vibrant early-stage research field. Through an extensive literature review, together with authors’ long-term research in the field, this paper discusses the key technologies needed for RCGIS developments, examines status of current research and development, and proposes some further study areas. It is hoped that the paper presents an overall picture of the field and will provide a good starting point and reference for researchers stepping into this area.

We

Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [RGPIN/250346-2011], the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41301433), the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province in China (Grant BK20131113). The authors would like to thank Miss Shishuo Xu for her assistance in compiling and verifying references and citations.

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