=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-498/paper-10
|storemode=property
|title=Collaborative GIS platforms for Storytelling - Case Study: Battleship Averof
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-498/steg09_submission_13.pdf
|volume=Vol-498
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icwl/PapadakiGS09
}}
==Collaborative GIS platforms for Storytelling - Case Study: Battleship Averof==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-498/steg09_submission_13.pdf
Collaborative GIS platforms for Storytelling – Case
Study: Battleship Averof
Haroula Papadaki, Eleni Gadolou, Emmanuel Stefanakis
Department of Geography, Harokopio University of Athens
70, El. Venizelou Ave, 17671 Kallithea – Athens, Greece
{xpapadaki, egkadolou, estef}@hua.gr
Abstract. 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.
Keywords: CMS, Collaboration, Storytelling, GIS, Historical Maps
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
[2] users and storytellers can create a very powerful tool, used for several applications
(e.g. education, gaming).
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 [3] – Storytelling Systems and the role that historical map
collections can have in storytelling platforms. A case study is being implemented in
terms of IKYDA project [4], [5], [6] “Non-linear Digital Storytelling for the
Battleship G. Averof” [7] with the chair of Informatik 5 RWTH, (http://www-
i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/).
2 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 Architecture
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. [8]
standard interfaces. Additionally an O.G.C. catalog server [8] and a multimedia
catalog server will be used as a single point of access to all O.G.C. interfaces and
multimedia repositories respectively.
• 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.
Collaboration Platform
Web Services
Content
Management
System
Historical
GIS Strory Telling
Maps
Servers
Geospatial & Cartographic
GeoServer, MapServer Multimedia Catalog
Catalog
WMS, WFS, WCS
Databases
Spatiotemporal Multimedia
DataBase & DataBase &
Metadata Metadata
(OGC) (MPEG-7)
Fig. 1 Collaborative GIS/Storytelling system Architecture
2.2 Current development
During designing and implementing the system described above, some work has
already been done.
• A spatiotemporal database based on the records of the ship’s diaries. The
PostgreSQL/PostGIS [9] open source software package has been adopted for the
implementation.
• A historical photographs database with use of PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
• A geographic catalog server to transform the data repository into a Spatial
Data Infrastructure [10]. The software package used for this
implementation is the GeoNetwork Open Source Server [11].
• A series of Web-Mapping Applications presenting the main events of the
ship’s history, using geographic mashups (http://averof.dynalias.net)
• A series of images associated spatially and temporally are uploaded in
RWTH repository (http://merkur.informatik.rwth-
achen.de/bscw/bscw.cgi/2614228)
• A story is generated about Lemnos Battle [12] using YouTell [13]
application and two hypothetical scenarios (What would have happened
if...) issue a non-linear story (http://merkur.informatik.rwth-
aachen.de/bscw/bscw.cgi/d2729524/YouTell_HPapadaki.pdf)
• A CMS – GIS platform has been implemented using the Plone Maps [14],
geographical tool for Plone.
3 Future Work
• 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 [15]) and the possibilities
of cooperating with the Map Standards (O.G.C., I.S.O. [15])
• Examine the possibility of extending YouTell templates using XML [16]
schemas for geo-mapping domains (GML) [8] for extracting data on the Web.
• Explore the usability of the geographical data of a map collection (vectors) in
order to narrate or represent a time series of spatial and non spatial changes.
For example, a story can be implemented about a certain area (e.g. an island -
polygon) with changing properties through time (placename, area, ownership)
due to various historical events (wars, treaties, annexations). For this, the
appropriate geospatial temporal ontologies that will be used to show the
correlation of current and historical places should be defined [17].
References
1. CMS, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system/ (last access: July 2009)
2. Geographic Information Systems,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system / (last access: July 2009)
3. Balram S., Dragićević S, Collaborative Geographic Information, 2006
4. IKYDA project, http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/lehrstuhl/projects/IKYDA/ (last
access: July 2009)
5. IKYDA project, http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~stefanak/ha/ (last access: July 2009)
6. Stefanakis, E., and Krtikos, G., 2007. The Battleship “G.Averof”. Project Proposal.
Department of Geography. Harokopio University of Athens. June 2007. [In Greek].
7. Battleship G. Averof, http://www.bsaverof.com/ (last access: July 2009)
8. Open Geospatial Consortium, www.opengeospatial.org/ (last access: July 2009)
9. PosgresSQL, www.postgresql.org, http://postgis.refractions.net/ (last access: July 2009)
10. Douglas D. Nebert, The SDI cookbook, 2004
11. Geonetwork Opensource, http://geonetwork-opensource.org/ (last access: July 2009)
12. Lemnos Battle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Lemnos/ (last access: July
2009)
13. Martini, A. Community-basiertes Storytelling im Web 2.0. Diplomarbeit, RWTH Aachen,
14. Plone CMS, http://plone.org, (last access: July 2009)
15. International Organization for Standardization, http://www.iso.org/ (last access: July 2009)
16. XML , http://www.w3.org/XML/ (last access: July 2009)
17. Tomi Kauppinen, Jari Väätäinen, and Eero Hyvönen, Creating and Using Geospatial
Ontology Time Series in a Semantic Cultural Heritage Portal, The Semantic Web: Research
and Applications, Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg,
ISBN: 978-3-540-68233-2, 2008.