Chapter 8 – GIS for Everyone: The CommonGIS Project and Beyond

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the project CommonGIS, which has the motto “GIS for everyone.” Its objective is to devise approaches and methods for making modem techniques of map-based exploratory data analysis accessible to a broad community of potential users. Besides technical accessibility, which is attained by applying the Java applet technology, it is important to ensure that the techniques are also utilized appropriately and effectively even by the users with little or no expertise in cartography or geographical information systems (GISs). This task is specially challenging because of the novelty of the exploratory tools. Experiments show that without previous instruction people make limited use of these tools. Therefore, it is very necessary to find proper ways of providing intelligent software-based assistance that will encourage and help people to use the tools. CommonGIS runs over the Internet by means of a standard web browser. It can be viewed both as an interactive Web-GIS (because it provides some standard GIS functionality) and as a tool for exploratory analysis of geographically referenced statistical data. To support the analysis, CommonGIS provides highly interactive and dynamically transformable maps and other types of data displays, in accord with the concept of “geographic visualization”.