A Geoweb-Based Tagging System for Borderlands Data Acquisition

Borderlands modeling and understanding depend on both spatial and non-spatial data, which were difficult to obtain in the past. This has limited the progress of borderland-related research. In recent years, data collection technologies have developed greatly, especially geospatial Web 2.0 technologies including blogs, publish/subscribe, mashups, and GeoRSS, which provide opportunities for data acquisition in borderland areas. This paper introduces the design and development of a Geoweb-based tagging system that enables users to tag and edit geographical information. We first establish the GeoBlog model, which consists of a set of geospatial components, posts, indicators, and comments, as the foundation of the tagging system. GeoBlog is implemented such that blogs are mashed up with OpenStreetMap. Moreover, we present an improvement to existing publish/subscribe systems with support for spatio-temporal events and subscriptions, called Spatial Publish/Subscribe, as well as the event agency network for routing messages from the publishers to the subscribers. A prototype system based on this approach is implemented in experiments. The results of this study provide an approach for asynchronous interaction and message-ordered transfer in the tagging system.