Author(s): Rodrigues, Renato de Lemos Mendes Severino
Date: 2009
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/1990
Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Subject(s): Online mapping; GeoCollaboration; Geographic Information Systems; Spatial operators; Spatial decision-making
MSC Dissertation in Computer Engineering
With recent developments in Web-based Mapping technologies, the use of digital spatial data has become accessible to people that would not originally use this type of data. Moreover, with the widespread availability of online mapping tools, the perfect stage is set for the development of spatial tools to enable collaboration in spatial decision-making. In this dissertation, different approaches to spatial collaboration are examined, both from a conceptual and technical point of view. The analysis of existing efforts into collaboration and spatial decision-making, supported by different techniques, revealed potential for spatial collaboration over the Internet. Before pursuing its implementation, a technological and conceptual study had to be realized, on the needs that distributed users will have, when collaboration spatially. This study supports the choice of spatial operators to facilitate collaboration through space, to compose a distributed work environment developed using currently available online mapping services. The first contribution of this work results from the conceptual approach, and it consists on a generic activity model for public participation to support different types of spatial decisionmaking where the public is involved. Following the definition of the model, a generic collaborative Spatial decision support system was developed, containing the necessary structures to enable the application of the model in different spatial decision making contexts.
