Social Collaboration Model Support for Collaborative 3d Gis Environment Based on Multi-agent Method

The existing 3D Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are confronting complex requirements when Internet-based technology is arising: the users need to share not only 3D data but also the same understanding of the work contexts and environments when they are geographically dispersed, so that they can collaboratively work together for a common goal. These kinds of requirements are usually seen in urban planning, emergency management, group spatial decision support system, etc. The difficulties of meeting these requirements relate to not only the technological design and implementation in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), but also the investigation to the social factors for a given collaborative environments. In this paper, a social collaboration model for group decision making process based on a case study is developed in the form of ontology-based presentation. Through applying this model to GeoLink3D, a synchronous collaborative 3D GIS, and related multi-agent systems, geographically dispersed users could collaboratively work together to carry out a common task under a real-time collaborative 3D GIS environment.