Collaborative GIS in the given framework is holistic in nature where human perspective is interwoven with geospatial technologies. Collaborative GIS focusses on problem solving, establishes and maintains an alignment between personal and group goals. The basic premise emanates from a belief that best of geo-information infrastructure (GII) will remain mere idealism till the time it gets closer to common man referred to as geocommons in the present article and this can only be established through collaboration and partnership.
1. Why collaboration?
The movie Day After Tomorrow demonstrates the urgency for collaboration in spatial information cutting across administrative hierarchies. Geo-information today is getting more real and is widening its accessibility, though with variations from region to region, industry to industry and government to government but geocommons are still far away from the real benefit. Agreed, the benefits have widened, but still the large exposure is limited to either academic discourses (written or otherwise) or industry discourses promoting their brands. Collaborations, by-and-large have been demonstrated as pilots by few localised success stories.
GIS collaboration is required, otherwise gecommons will become more common and forgotten and the benefits of enriched geospatial science with multi-functional capabilities through multiple tools and datasets of high resolution will remain distant for them. The caretakers of GIS community recognise the fact that we are not and can never be completely independent in an interconnected world so let there be collaboration at technology front, at data front or/and human front living across regions.
Certainly, the availability of consistent regional datasets, based on the integration of national datasets will improve our ability to reduce land use conflict, resolve environmental issues, manage large scale natural disasters, manage our land and ocean resources in a sustainable way, develop our communications and transport infrastructures, undertake population studies and support international treaties.
However, in the GIS world, even today for a large part o the world, despite the proliferation of geospatial technologies, it is a small number of highly trained professionals that have access to data and tools with which they render maps to be distributed to everyone else. As technology advanced, these maps started to be delivered to web browsers and have some interactivity. The model however always remained the same though with professional gate keepers that brokered knowledge out to the masses. While the new technologies, like Google and other mapping applications, coming from the GIS vendors all have the right buzz words in both static and dynamic environment, they still work on the same model.
