GeoSpaces/sup TM/-A virtual collaborative software environment for interactive analysis and visualization of geospatial information

Geographic information systems (GIS) software products have been available for the past two decades, offering the imagery and geospatial analyst mature and robust visualization and analysis capabilities. In recent years, tools for collaborating over the Internet with colleagues, family, and friends have emerged. Early capabilities supported simple chatting and instant messaging between two or more geographically dispersed collaborators, simultaneously and in real-time. More capable application sharing tools quickly followed, allowing multiple collaborators to read and write simultaneously within the same document. More recently, rich collaborative environments have emerged, providing robust resources such as file and data management, conferencing centers, electronic whiteboarding, automatic resource location, knowledge management tools, and many more bundled applications. A logical extension to these new Internet-based capabilities is to couple the mature GIS functionality with the emerging electronic whiteboarding tool concept, providing a geo-referenced, collaborative whiteboard. This paper describes such a new capability, called GeoSpace/sup TM/. General Dynamics Electronic Systems has developed and demonstrated GeoSpace/sup TM/ for operational use across a diverse set of applications. In this paper, we describe the underlying technical approach to process and share remotely sensed information within the context of a specific disaster assessment and management application.