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Title

WEB STRABO: A FRAMEWORK FOR PARTICIPATORY CARTOGRAPHY ON THE WEB

Abstract

STRABO is a participatory cartography technique, originally developed to provide researchers with an alternative way to obtain spatial data from local experts in situations where field measurements were scarce or missing. Strabo is a geographic implementation of the Delphi method. STRABO was developed by Wayne Luscombe in his doctoral dissertation at Simon Fraser University in 1986.

 

Thus far, STRABO implementations are standalone depending on proprietary software. In this project we will port STRABO to the web environment based solely on Open Source software.

 

Typically, STRABO applications are based on on-site participation of an experts panel, porting the methodology to the web would allow new ways of interaction and broaden the range of applications.

 

The STRABO web application includes three different incarnations:

1. Full on-site application that is a direct translation to the web of current STRABO applications

2. Remote synchronous framework to develop STRABO sessions on-line without the requirement of physical presence, like an on-line meeting.

3. Full asynchronous web application that allows the development of spatial polls without requiring neither physical presence nor synchronous discussions.

 

The later two cases require new tools to foster the discussion among the experts and to proxy the role of the on-site facilitator. These tools will be chat clients and forums linked to geographical features.

 

In addition to the traditional role of STRABO, the implementation of the methodology on the web will allow a more robust methodology to multi-stakeholder approaches for participative policy-making.

 

The application uses postgres-postgis as both, the database backend and the geoprocesing engine for vector data operations. Since the application involves heavy use of the WFS specification we chose GeoServer as the backend for cartography. On the client side OpenLayers and GeoExt are used to manage the display of cartographic information and user interaction.

 

Authors

Pablo Lopez Ramirez - CentroGeo
Jesus Trujillo Almeida - CentroGeo
Fidel Serrano Candela - CentroGeo
Rodrigo Tapia Mcclung - CentroGeo
Alberto Porras Velazquez - CentroGeo