The Geocollaboration Toolbox - Groove and Toucan Navigate
Geocollaboration (like collaboration, communication and social networking) is a human behaviour, rather than a system feature. But technology can be a great amplifier of human behaviours (look at what the telephone, email, instant messaging has done for communication). So lets talk about some tools that can amplify the geocollaboration experience. If you're reading this you are probably well aware that:
- Virtual Earth is the big stack of geographical information in the sky with APIs and extension points waiting to be, well, extended.
- Groove is the application in the Office System that provides collaboration across boundaries - whether they be organisational (across companies/departments), geographical (across regions/continents) or technical (across intermittent/hostile networks).
Now it would be great if we could take all that map data on Virtual Earth and display it in Groove. Done already - in relatively short amounts of code.
It would be even better if we could take all that business data stored in Groove and display it on a Virtual Earth map. Also done already in Toucan Navigate, which I'll dive into in more detail:
Toucan Navigate is a sexy smart client application that presents a single, unified view of geographical information from a number of different sources. These sources could be Virtual Earth, ESRI shapes, SQL Server data, Groove tools, CSV files or even GPS devices.
While Toucan Navigate does not share files or data itself, it lets Groove do all the hard work behind the scenes, securely shuffling data through the interweb, over phone lines or broadcast through the air. Below, a screenshot overlaying Virtual Earth with an ESRI shape file of old growth forests in Indonesia - the shape itself, is stored in a Groove workspace.
"ESRI shapes are all well and good, but surely any GIS app worth the mustard can do them." you may think. That would be true if that was all that Toucan Navigate did. But the real killer feature for me is the ability to represent Groove Forms geographically - representing on a map the locations of customers, assets, survey results or any other information that you might happen to collect via Groove. Below, a selection of Smoked Meat Sandwich sellers in Montreal captured in a Groove tool (mission critical coordinates courtesy of poifriend):
Toucan Navigate and Groove can enable some very interesting scenarios:
- Mapping static information such as database information, GIS shapes with emerging and dynamic information such as asset locations and status reports in Groove.
- Multiple teams working in the field (and sporadically connected to the network) with Groove and perhaps a GPS. These teams are surveying sites, filling in forms and gathering information in Groove. Back at HQ or the coordinator's desk, the information is displayed on the Toucan Navigate map as the intermittently connected groove clients synchronise information to the HQ/coordinator's groove client.
- Different Groove workspaces storing different information, with different audiences. For instance, in a natural disaster response situation, there might be a humanitarian workspace and an Emergency Services workspace. The Emergency Services staff may be members of the humanitarian workspace. Their Toucan Navigate client overlays that geographic information with the information in their own workspace, but not vice versa.
All in all, Toucan Navigate is a fantastic tool to have in your collaboration toolbox. InfoPatterns have done an awesome job of creating an easy to use GIS application that uses Groove's strengths and Virtual Earth data to create an tool could add so much more value than the some of its parts.
