Realtime Conferencing in GIS

Most GIS applications support multi-user facilities only to the extent that many people can access the same data as if they were each the only user. For collaborative work, it is beneficial for participants to be able to browse, annotate and query the data with full awareness of each other. Groupware or Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) provides support for groups of people to participate in virtual conferences from different locations. We demonstrate the advantages to be gained by applying CSCW to GIS and describe GroupARC, an application enabling GIS data to be simultaneously browsed, queried and annotated by many participants.