New Frontiers For Webgis Platforms Generation

Information intensive applications usually involve highly collaborative activities and aspects throughout all the different stages of the information seeking and retrieval process. They are usually performed by work groups composed by heterogeneous professionals: a pervasive collaboration of diverse partners is needed to harmonize different tasks through the common objective. Team components are usually located in different physical structures and the workflow tasks, such as data harvesting, aggregation, elaboration and presentation, need a high quality and quantity of communication to deliver a result with high standard level. Designing and implementing an integrated system able to deal with large amount of highly heterogeneous data, to allow distributed data access and to provide collaboration between partners requires a deep analysis of the diverse requirements and habits of all the operators. Such a development environment should take into account all these requirements and should be open to real time modifications and improvements with the audit of the final users. Target domains for such kind of information systems are environment heritage conservation and tourism promotion: these domains refer to a complex production chain where private companies and public institutions are involved with specific interests and skills. A relevant amount of the information needed and produced in these activities are referred to the territory, therefore have to be represented as geo-referenced data and the system being set up in order to create and share each task of the knowledge workflow must support a widespread typology of data (Barricelli et al., 2008). Two important aspects are to be stressed in the design of this kind of information systems: one is the possibility to shorten the publication cycle of the information, providing authoring tools to the information providers in order to let them quickly edit and/or update information with a minor help from the IT staff. The other is the ability of creating a customizable environment that can be adapted to the diverse professionals involved in the whole process. 86Human Machine Interaction - Getting Closer Such a complex system can nowadays be developed by integrating already available components and making them inter-operable or adopting an integrated approach and developing a single integrated design environment. The latter approach has many benefits in terms of homogeneity in design and usability both for content generator actors and end users. In this work we present a proposal for the creation of an integrated design and content management environment for a WebGIS application. The proposed system is addressed to local administrations in collaboration with diverse data providers and should be designed implementing a methodology that supports a strict cooperation between developers and end users in terms of features' design and use feedback. To address these requirements, the Software Shaping Workshop methodology for the design and development of virtual environments has been adopted, as described in Section 3: the proposed architecture will support all the stakeholders involved in the environment heritage conservation and tourism promotion workflow by implementing information manipulation and exploitation functionalities on three levels: meta-design level, design level and use level. The fairly extended state of the art presented in Section 2 highlights the novelty of our approach by offering an integrated environment covering the complete workflow, realized by the means of a network of specialized sub-environments where all the actors can exchange and produce information that will be stored in a shared knowledge base.