Environmental Knowledge Management and Spatial Business Rules in the SPeCS Collaborative Framework

Good acquaintance with an organization’s business rules is an undeniable success factor in a decision-making process. In environmental studies, decisions are multidisciplinary, rule oriented and are very much related to spatiality. SPeCS (Spatial Decision Support Collaborative System) is a framework which intends to support the aspects of multi-criteria spatial analysis within a distributed GIS architecture. This work has the following objectives: i) to define spatial business rules, so common in environmental studies; ii) to emphasize the importance of having the appropriate resources and techniques for managing this spatial knowledge; iii) to present a proposal complementing knowledge management in SPeCS with the appropriate support for spatial business rules; iv) and to validate some of the ideas presented through an implemented prototype.