Collaborative Environmental Knowledge Management

This article describes the integration of a smartphone, a world viewer and a geodatabase into a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) as a knowledge management platform for use in land management. A spatial interoperability mechanism was designed for integration of these various technologies distributed in different system layers and written in different programming languages. As users may vary in their education backgrounds and understanding of advanced information technologies, the proposed platform employs existing popular spatial technologies to facilitate usage. The platform includes an iPhone™ application, a web portal based on Google Earth™ viewer and a data server, all of which may be deployed in different and distant places, allowing remote collaboration. To evaluate the usability of the platform, a case study was implemented involving a scientist, a farmer and an agricultural consultant working collaboratively, but remotely, within the system to support their farming practices, decision-making and agricultural research. Users found that the efficiency of agricultural knowledge transfer was increased, and the centralized knowledge database would also be helpful for tracking farming history and supporting agricultural research. This represents a new paradigm in agricultural knowledge management, where relationships between the three key parties are bidirectional, in contrast to the traditional knowledge transfer pattern. This paradigm can be readily extended to other environmental management contexts.