A General Framework for Real-Time Geocollaboration: Spatial Behavior Lock Graph

Nowadays, an important trend is the mobility for the development in global position system (GPS) which enable the users to pinpoint their position anywhere on earth. According to Neogeography (MTurner 2006), people can create their own maps and convey location information among friends and visitors. In fact, most work with geospatial data is carried out by groups (Maceachren and Brewer 2004). And geographic research, decision-making and education are, more than ever before, the products of group activities (MacEachren 2001,Technology and Council 2003). Popular concepts include collaborative GIS (Neville and Clare 1996, Shivanand Balram 2006), Multiple Criteria Decision Models (MCDM) (Malczewski 1999), Argument Map (Rinner 1999), Collaborative Mapping, Collaborative GIS Data Production (Li and Coleman 2002), collaborative spatial decision-making (CSDM) (Armstrong and Densham 1995,MacEachren 2001), geocollaboration (Maceachren and Brewer 2004) and volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007). To maintain terminological consistency, we use geocollaboration in this paper. Real-time geocollaboration can be defined as a collaboration that allows geographically dispersed people to view and contribute to the shared geographical knowledge (or spatial decision) over the Internet at same time by referring to the definition of real-time collaborative systems (Greenberg, Roseman, Webster and Bohnet 1992, Greenberg, Hayne and Rada 1995, Kanawati 1997, Sun, Jia, Zhang, Yang and Chen 1998, Sun and Chen 2002, Agustina, Liu, Xia, Shen and Sun 2008,Chang and Li 2012). We are particularly interested in how to build a general framework to support geographically dispersed people work together to achieve various geocollaborative applications with real-time requirement.