Enabling Geo-Collaborative Visual Analysis

The GeoJabber concept, protocol, and working prototype software introduced here enable same-time different-place collaborative geovisualization. The key problem this work addresses is how to turn geovisual software states into persistent textual representations that can be shared between users. In the current implementation, GeoJabber leverages three key Open Source technologies: the GeoViz Toolkit, the Jabber protocol, and XStream. GeoJabber is the first project to support same-time different-place geovisualization tool state sharing. As part of this effort, this paper presents a typology of sharable geovisualization software states, rooted in the concepts of data, display, and category.