Collaborative Environmental Planning with GeoMed

Environmental planning usually involves a large number of decision makers with different backgrounds and interests. Appropriate decision making procedures are needed in order to jointly consider their individual approaches and achieve collaboration. This paper discusses issues involved in Collaborative Environmental Planning and reports work on GeoMed, a group decision support system for Geographical Mediation on the World Wide Web. We first present an argumentation framework that constitutes the core of the system and supports fair, rational and efficient decision making. In the sequel, we discuss the necessary enhancements in order to deal with spatial applications, and environmental planning in particular. Finally, we give a description of GeoMed and an overview of the services provided.