Content Management Systems [1] are widely used in web sites and portals lately, promoting collaboration among groups of users. Collaboration applies to many fields and storytelling in the Web is one of them. When a group of users can contribute into telling a story the result could be apart from a more detailed story, an interesting educational method. Since the main purpose of a storyteller is to make the audience interested in the story, then ways to achieve this should be found. Visualizing the story is one of these ways. Interactive maps create a visual story and give an easily accessible starting place from which users can explore at their own pace based on their own interests. In this paper the need to integrate collaborative storytelling with collaborative GIS in the Web is stated and the use of historical map collections for this purpose is validated.
1 Introduction Maps are important in storytelling since they can set the geographical context and convey any underlying spatial information of a story. When the story being told is about historical events then a collection of relative maps of that time period is almost a prerequisite for the better comprehension of it.
In addition to visualizing the story being told interactively, collaboration among GIS
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This paper presents the research that currently takes place in the Department of
Geography of Harokopio University of Athens, regarding the integration of Web
based Collaborative GIS [
Development of a Collaborative GIS – Storytelling platform for the IKYDA project and the importance of using historical map collections in it.
The IKYDA project deals with the promotion and enrichment of Battleship’s Averof museum archives. As a result, the ship’s rich history will become widely known and new interesting methods of education will be developed.
The main idea is to create a Web-Based application that invites individuals and community partners to experience and share knowledge or memories through interactive mapping to contribute to an enduring record of Battleship Averof’s history and culture, whilst interesting storytelling methods – like non linear storytelling tools are developed.
An application like that should • link stories and memories to places in the landscape (life in the ship, battles, movement, etc), • use historical and contemporary maps to link the past to the present (the development of the ship from a strong weapon to a museum), • use historical documents and maps to show the movement of the ship over time, and • use digital models and maps to layer stories 2.1.1
A multi-tier architecture was selected for the implementation of GIS Story Telling Collaboration platform. More specifically the architecture is narrowed to the following three tiers: (Figure1)
• Application Tier This is the topmost level of the application where the Web Services are deployed. It consists of a CMS platform which encapsulates GIS and storytelling capabilities as plug-in. Current GIS capabilities should be enhanced by adopting historic map infrastructures. There are two approaches regarding historical maps and the storytelling procedure, being studied. Historical maps can either have a supporting or a leading role, depending on the goal the story has to fulfill.
• Service Tier
This tier acts as the glue component providing standardized access to data.
Concerning GIS capabilities all images, features and coverages will be served to the
application tier over the internet by a server that implements all the O.G.C. [
• Data Tier This tier consists of Database Servers. Here information is physically stored and retrieved. This tier keeps data neutral and independent from all the above tiers. Specifically it consists of distributed network of spatiotemporal and multimedia database servers which could be located anywhere in. Thus by giving data their own tier we improve scalability and performance of our framework.
s e c i v r e S b e W s r e v r e S s e s a b a t a D m r o f t a l P n o ti a r o b a ll o C
GIS
The system described in chapter 2 will be implemented by unifying all the existing tools, provided that they should first be enriched.
A deeper examination of the CMS-GIS platforms available will contribute into choosing a complete Collaborative GIS platform for the system to be implemented.
Examine closer the multimedia standards (MPEG-7 [