Abstract
Spatial Annotation Technology for Public Deliberation
Track: Education
Author(s): Guoray Cai, Bo Yu
Many public policies and decisions deal with geospatially expressed problems that are complex and controversial in nature, which requires broad participation of all interested parties in the form of deliberative dialogues. In this presentation, we present a framework to address the challenges of facilitating public deliberation. This framework uses spatial annotation objects as models for deliberative artifacts, and manages annotations by a spatial data model that reflects the ecological relationships among annotations, visual contexts, discussion threads, spatial referents, and cognitive states of their holders. As a proof of the concept, we cite our system, GeoDeliberator, which offers some unique spatial annotation capture, retrieval and visualization capabilities, such as context memory, reference to multiple geo-objects in one annotation, inferring and visualizing new relations using spatial-temporal and thread-based reasoning, and user-controlled annotation sharing. We demonstrate the utility of GeoDeliberator through a scenario of engaging a university community in building a smoke-free campus.
Guoray Cai
Penn State University
307F IST Building
Penn State University
University Park , Pennsylvania 16802
United States
Phone: 814-865-4448
E-mail: cai@ist.psu.edu
Bo Yu
Penn State University
309 IST Building
University Park , Pennsylvania 16802
United States
Phone: 814-865-6177
E-mail: byu@ist.psu.edu