Geospatial Information in Complex Mobile Field Settings

Field data collection and information management are essential to numerous government field operations. Geospatial data and emerging computing technologies offer the potential to vastly expand the type and quality of support available to the field worker during field campaigns. This requires the development of appropriate field tools and computing systems to responsively and reliably support secure information exchange between the stored repositories, remote services, and the mobile field environment. For example, new models for extensible computing infrastructures are needed to support field activities with intermittent and highly constrained mobile computing settings. At the same time, methodological principles are needed to guide user interface design for displaying geospatial information resources with limited screen environments for scientific data collection.