A cscw system for building reviewing by integrating gis with oa

Abstract

The process of urban building reviewing is a collaborative work by a group of urban planning staffs and land managers who are working with different departments of a organization. There are three ingredients for improving the work efficiency, i.e., agile communication and interactive mechanisms, good information, effective processing and visualizing tools. In order to build a computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) system in Urban Planning and Land Administration Bureau in Changzhou Municapality, GIS was integrated with office automation (OA). The workflow and organizational structure had been re-engineered to meet the requirement of application of the new technology. Federated databases were constructed by assembling disparate sources of heterogeneous spatial and attribute data. Easy access to the data by contents was developed for promoting information sharing within the organization. Specific desktop spatial data handling tools were provided for delineating land lots or building layouts on large-scale digital maps. Office automation functions, including applications registering, reasonableness checking, opinions giving and exchanging, were developed and they permit printing and documents filing. The work efficiency in the organization has been improved by introducing the computer-based collaborative building reviewing system. © 2000 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.