[Disclaimer: It's a roundabout 20 pages long, and a lot is just conjecture, so readers beware.] Whether or not anyone actually reads it, it was fun to write. I was forced to really think about application design and developing for real-time, multi-user interaction on a detailed level. Since most undergraduate CS education is structured for you, writing this paper enabled me to get a feel for what it means to constructively forge your own problems in computer science/engineering and was a great keyhole to research in that regard.
As discussed in my DMP internship diary,
my final project was to write a whitepaper on Geocollaboration. A
"whitepaper" is exploratory, i.e., since I'm a newcomer to Geographic Information Systems
and Human Computer Interaction, it's not quite research-grade. As Mary Beth said, it's a "a stake
in the ground" that lets people know what you're interested in and
suggests possibilities to get a discourse ball rolling.
Synopsis:
My "stake" (maybe more of a toothpick) in the ground is a walkthrough
of some issues related to Geocollaboration: 1. a sample insurance risk-assessment
scenario in the aftermath of a hurricane (Charley was
imminent when I began writing it) 2. a discussion of some
requirements in designing a geocollaborative
tool 3. and a comparison of current geocollaborative tool architectures: the
map tool in Bridge and Toucan Navigate in Groove. It's all over the
map, so to speak.
"Geocollaborafrankenstein:
A Novice's Walkthrough of Geocollaboration"
pdf (335 KB)
doc (178 KB)
