Designing a GIS-Based CSCW System for Development Control with an Event-Driven Approach

Abstract

Development control in urban planning is a collaborative decision-making process where a group of urban planners and land management staffs review or process the building application(s) submitted by a public agency and private citizen according to predefined regulations and workflow. This paper presents an event-driven approach for designing and developing a GIS-based Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) system for urban development control. This approach attempts to model both the structural and behavioral aspects of the development control process by integrated representation of agents, events, and states as well as their relations. These relations can be represented with UML (Unified Modeling Language), causal entity-relation diagram, and Event Pattern Language-based formal specifications. The integration of heterogeneous spatial and non-spatial data within such a GIS-based CSCW system for development control is also introduced in this paper. A method to link spatial objects and attributes in the multiscale, multitype dataset is proposed. Moreover, three kinds of specific functions are developed for handling routine works of development control, such as office automation functions, desktop spatial data handling and mapping tools, and generic queries.