Co-PPGIS

Co-PPGIS has a wide variety of applications like municipal planning, emergency response, public health and security, etc. The main focus of this chapter is on the development and design of a Web Collaborative PPGIS (Co-PPGIS) infrastructure. As part of municipality’s planning and management services, Co-PPGIS is developed for real-time map sharing application system. Co-PPGIS is an effective and essential online meeting system for supporting group collaborations on geographic information such as maps and imageries, and capturing and sharing of local/domain knowledge in real time. Co-PPGIS permits amalgamation of geospatial data and collaborator’s input in the form of geo-referenced notations. It incorporates coherent components as map sharing, real-time chat, video conferencing, geo-referenced textual and graphical notations. The study aims to focus on public participation and geo-collaboration facilitated with information sharing, interactive geo-conferencing, real-time map, and data sharing with tools to draw features or add annotation to the map while discussions, uploading documents, and live communication. Co-PPGIS provides an efficient and reliable platform that will significantly reduce the time to acquire, process, and analyze data. The significance of this study is to contribute to existing public participation practices, to municipal planning, to decision-making, or to geographic information science.

Design modeling of Co-PPGIS

The prosperity of developing and establish a Geospatial enabled Co-PPGIS, for enhancing the ability of people participation in collaborative decision-making during management workflows and municipal planning, most importantly it depends on a brief understanding of firstly the ideas of community participation in management and planning which involves basics ideas of role in participation, amount of community participation, and already existing participation of community at the time of municipal development, planning and management and second important concern is on functional and non-functional requirements, that are identified by existing PPGIS and that is related to research models, which are developed during municipality management to support public participatory processes. It begins with an explanation and overview of a Co-PPGIS idea, which executes the role of a real-time synchronous and asynchronous participatory approach to help the decision makers to make decisions to assimilate people role at the time of a municipal planning process. Some are the information sources and withdraw for the requirements of modeling of an advance Co-PPGIS for planning and management of municipal related projects. Although, it gives an introductory source of information that introduce an idea of advance Co-PPGIS to understand the infrastructure of a Co-PPGIS and to find out the gaps between existing municipal planning processes and possible improvements in Co-PPGIS.

An idea of advance Co-PPGIS

An idea or concept is a plane, intention image of a specific thing, institution, or a class, and a framework is introduced as a form which gives support to the number of elements and fulfill as a package. Basically, a conceptual framework is a structure of interlinked ideas, which gives support of a certain phenomenon or process to build understanding. Public participation is necessary for the evolution of a country, city, and municipality planning, development, management, and decision-making which will speed up the process of planning. During planning, development, and management of municipality in a city or state, the management of geospatial data remains a challenge. Co-PPGIS gives us a planning and management related spatial and non-spatial information to the decision makers, higher authorities, and government bodies on a basis of real-time basis geospatial Web conferencing infrastructure. In this chapter, the advance Co-PPGIS has focus on municipal projects through developing a GIS-enabled virtual meeting idea. The advance Co-PPGIS framework is showed as five viewpoints, which are shortly discussed below:

Social viewpoint: The first side of social viewpoint in the Co-PPGIS is to highlight and show a name of project which will help stakeholders (see Figure 4) to play its role in the related project or matter. Before joining the meeting that will aid the stakeholders to find out the status of all participants submission of user profile, there are some ethics, rules, and values for community in social interaction. Their interaction level rises when the participants join the meeting or session. They exchange their ideas and views, which guide to better decision-making processes for municipal projects.

Geo-spatial viewpoint: This idea links with mixture of time, place, and channels of communication. To address a meeting physically, it is difficult for everyone nowadays. That is why the advanced latest technology provides participants envision the working location. Through GIS technology, the advance prototype allows a participant to visualize an area of interest, draw or highlight, navigate on the map, and patch on the map. This is how the participants can seek others for discussion related to analytical issues on any point and the provision of a small point is very essential in any project which is related to municipal.

Municipality viewpoint: In any municipal project, the idea of all information regarding a project at one place is very important. This is how one project from another project differentiates the status in the same domain. The advance collaborative PPGIS has the provision to gather and supervise the data, e.g., planning info, minutes of previous meetings, drawings/maps, feedback form, notification, etc., at one place and a participant can easily get the information at that level which they want. So, a new participant can easily reach the present level after taking information from step one. Public role is very essential in the development of projects, and its importance was not perceived in the last few decades; whereas, community is now playing its essential role for making the decision-making process transparent and better.

Participation viewpoint: This crucial idea is very essential while constructing a collaborative PPGIS. It enhances participant’s abilities in the municipality project standard and with their available conditions and time. Through synchronous approach, in which multiple people can see what the other people are doing at the same time without wasting, the second group of participants can share their point of views using drawing tools, mapping. Video chats are the best example of in which everyone can see and understand what other is doing. Stakeholders have indirect communication facility through asynchronous approach in which it is not compulsory to see what the other is saying at the same time. Among stakeholders, filling a feedback form is a good example of indirect communication. The advance PPGIS gives both direct and indirect communication facilities for improving the participation of stakeholders. The best example to fit the advance PPGIS participation viewpoint is the time-place matrix which is categorized according to the spatial and temporal dimensions [42, 43] starts from same time (synchronous) and same place (co-located), different time (asynchronous) and same place, different time and different place (distributed), and same time and different place.

Virtual meeting environment: With the passage of time, technology has become more advance and friendly. The advance Co-PPGIS has a solution in which a participant can easily participate through the electronic meeting facility without appearing physically in the meeting and share his views with relation to project. Participants can do video chat and can drop a message for a specific participant without any restriction. This is how, decision makers can easily involve in any project, which is being developed for a municipality for its effectiveness and efficiency, which will ultimately lead to better decision-making process. In developing countries, resources are minimum and need is maximum, like Pakistan and India. There is a massive need for developing such thing for public, which gives all these facilities, which are mentioned above, to give comfort to decision makers.

Shortly, Co-PPGIS environment is an online meeting procedure for supporting participant’s collaborations on geographical information like mapping and imageries, and collecting and sharing data during processes of management. Figure 5 shows Co-PPGIS virtual meeting workflow processes, service abilities, and to describe situations when its functional capabilities are useful.

This kind of environment allows combination of geospatial data from other sources from Web services and collaborators input through geo-referenced comments. It involves components such as audio/video conferencing, map sharing, geo-referenced textual, real-time chatting and graphical annotation, and user or session management.

Understanding a Co-PPGIS infrastructure

Co-PPGIS is basically a GIS-enabled collaborative and multi-function, essential meeting participatory infrastructure, which combines different information technology tools to accommodate participation and cooperation activities before public meetings (i.e., the major activities before public meetings is focused on information access, communication, and cooperation of stakeholders), during public meetings (i.e., real-time access to the meetings and their demonstration become paramount tasks), and after public meetings (the focus alters to the demonstration of syntheses of public participation, access to decisions, and receiving of feedbacks). As from above discussion, it is concluded that Co-PPGIS primarily centers on public meetings engaged during the municipal planning and development-related activities (Figure 6).

In order to properly and easily understand Co-PPGIS system completely, Co-PPGIS may be categorized as and/or mainly composed of two major application infrastructures. In other words, we can say that recommended Co-PPGIS is basically an amalgamation of two mechanisms of participation, cooperation, and communication between members, i.e., Co-PPGIS asynchronous and Co-PPGIS synchronous. In Co-PPGIS asynchronous participatory environment, Web-based GIS geo-referenced conversation platform and/or GIS Blog techniques are used to accommodate public input and discussion. In Co-PPGIS synchronous participatory map sharing environment, synchronous collaborative GIS processes are executed by applying computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) or groupware application principles. By this, participants can easily share comments, ideas, or suggestions after investigating spatial data by using digital multimedia tools and technologies (Figure 7).

Exploring gaps in existing municipal planning practices and possible improvements using Co-PPGIS

Exploring and contrasting of existing PPGIS application’s performance is essential or helpful in recognizing the functionality gaps between those collaborative PPGIS applications which organized crucial basis for Co-PPGIS requirement analysis and architectural design. Figure 8 depicts the research gaps in current or existing communication mediums or participation practices found during the literature review and recommended how the Co-PPGIS contributes to the existing practice in order to increase public participation in municipality planning and development projects. It also explains how the approaches in relation to the proposed/enhanced infrastructure of Co-PPGIS will organize, improve, stimulate, accommodate, and contribute to the existing public participation practices.

Issues and the improvements of these issues through Co-PPGIS are explained in this section. For instance: (1) through or by using Co-PPGIS meeting environment, the issue of inadequate communication, generated due to fixed-time meeting schedules, accessibility issues, lengthy presentations, and open talks with authorities can be accompanied because Co-PPGIS supports anywhere/anytime/anyone accesses with real-time participation support. (2) Through a spatial component of GIS-based platform or through real-time map sharing cooperative component of the Co-PPGIS the issue of inadequate way of investigating spatial data, i.e., using hard copy maps in the meeting sessions because Co-PPGIS increase the degree of public participation along with spatial data investigation during essential meeting sessions. (3) Through meeting scheduling/notifying and/or by the e-newsletter components of Co-PPGIS Blog, the issue of inadequate process of sending notification related to existing municipal development projects can be self-regulating/self-operating. (4) Information’s access associated to a municipality project’s level data can facilitate through project information blog which exhibit the existing or future municipal project’s notice detail, minutes of the meeting, presentation, document, location, and all valuable information. (5) Through Co-PPGIS, the absence of support to quick decision-making can be encouraged because Co-PPGIS upgrade or improve public participation or input as well as assist scattered decision makers to work coincidentally on a real-time basis to conclude the decision in timely manners, which eventually diminish the time span of planning and probability of failure.

The upcoming sections demonstrate prototypes’ execution of the proposed framework to assist its real-time synchronous participatory procedures that exhibit the innovations to be expected when trying to perceive the concepts established in this research.

References

Muhammad A. Butt, Syed Amer Mahmood, Javed Sami, Jahanzeb

Qureshi, Muhammad Kashif Nazir, Amer Masood, Khadija Waheed

and Aysha Khalid (February 20th 2019). Architectural Design and Prototyping of Co-PPGIS: A Groupware-Based Online Synchronous Collaborative PPGIS to Support Municipality Development and Planning Management Workflows, Trends in Geomatics - An Earth Science Perspective, Rifaat Abdalla, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.80091. Available from: https://www.intechopen.com/books/trends-in-geomatics-an-earth-science-perspective/architectural-design-and-prototyping-of-co-ppgis-a-groupware-based-online-synchronous-collaborative-

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