GeoComputation: A Coordination-Oriented Approach

Introduction During the past several years the research under the banner of “GeoComputation” has been developed in an open and diverse manner, with a wide range of techniques and application domains been addressed from various perspectives. While plurality and inclusiveness have been regarded as the strength of GeoComputation (Gahegan 2000), however, the diversity of expertise (which is usually very specialized) required to understand the proposed tools and the heterogeneity introduced by different tool providers have became major barriers to the successful application of GeoComputation in real world problem solving, especially when the targeting problem requires various tools and techniques to integrate and work as an analytical whole. This raises interesting interoperability issues that are not just about the sharing of data, but also related to the integration of problem solving knowledge in a much broader sense, including how to make methods accessible to domain users who are not technical experts, how to share functionalities between different tools, and how to capture and maintain consistency when knowledge are transferred between systems and subjects.