Cooperative Modeling in Applied Geographic Research

The characteristics of geographic data and the nature of geographic researchrequire the participation of many agents. Data is generated by multiplesources (satellites, ground observation, weather stations, photography, etc.),accessed, processed and transformed by many users and available for use to aneven larger population of users. Lack of coordination among all thesedifferent agents may render large amounts of work useless. Most existing GIS(Geographic Information Systems) do not provide any support for cooperativework, which adds to the problem. To overcome this serious limitation whilestill allowing users to take advantage of GIS technology, we propose GOOSE, asystem implemented as a top layer for existing GIS. GOOSE provides the toolsfor constructing large geographic models in a cooperative environment withpotentially many users and participants.Note: To appear in International Journal of Intelligent Cooperative Systems,May 1994. An extended abstract will appear in the Proceedings of theInternational Conference of Cooperative Information Systems, Toronto, Canada,May 1994 (CoopIS\'94).