Reconciliation of Inconsistent Perspectives in Collaborative GIS

Collaborative GIS provides a spatially referenced negotiation environment for decision makers to put forward their perspectives, discuss their differences, and, ultimately, make decisions. Recent research has focused on enabling the representation of, and selection from among, different opinions, while discussion among people has been ignored. This paper reports on a discussion process aimed at reconciling inconsistent perspectives in distributed workgroups. The Speech Act Theory (SAT) of Austin was extended to define both non-spatial and spatial speech acts in the context of a negotiation. A coordination process was modeled by these speech acts. Then, inconsistent perspectives were reconciled using detection of inconsistency, or initial integration of perspectives, or reconciliation of collaborators. The method we propose makes it possible to effectively describe the speech acts and use them to naturally represent the reconciliation process. A prototype system based on this approach was implemented in ex...