Developing a Collaborative Map Creation Support System by Multi-modal Information-gathering

This paper represents the framework which offers the user friendly data collection of the multi-modal information that consists of image, location data and texts, and secondary use of them. A local area information map creation system, for disaster prevention or crime prevention, is shown as an application of the suggested framework. Users collect the image data where people need attention together with the location data from GPS and its comments by UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC) or mobile phone outside. Currently, UMPC is used for the system development to temporarily overcome the limitations of application development on the mobile-phone, although data collection using mobile-phone must be a successful solution. Collected data are sent to a server machine, and the server machine automatically creates the information map that collected images and comments are arranged based on location data sent together. The created map is also published on the Net. This implementation is based on Ajax, using Google Maps API and JavaScript. The data collection can be done by several users and stored at a server space for each projects. When several users collect the information around the same area, the data collection eventually becomes a collaborative work. Thus the suggested system does not offer only the user friendly framework for the data collection but also the interface of the collaborative work of data collection. Similar GIS system is currently available on the Net, but they give only the interface to locate the photos and comments on a map.