International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B2. Istanbul 2004 
meetings, meeting outputs, public input, and project 
related documents can be accessed in the virtual space. 
More importantly, the public can access and review 
project documents, and provide input online anytime from 
anywhere, with the capability to explore GIS-based 
environmental impact analysis results. 
2. A public meeting is held for interested citizens and 
agencies to input on an ongoing EA study of a newly 
planned development (e.g. a road expansion project), 
using a large interactive display system to facilitate the 
meeting. Simultaneously, the display and meeting 
conversations are shared by those citizens, who are not 
able to physically attend, from their homes and offices 
using a Web browser or a handheld display. A group of 
specialists may respond to questions from citizens and 
interact with the shared display of the meeting using their 
desktop PCs which possess powerful GIS capabilities. 
The interconnection between these two use cases are reflected 
by the underlying information flows, decision-making, and 
participation workflows. Obviously, the public who is planning 
to attend public meetings at different stages of class EA study 
sufficiently understands the alternatives prior attending meeting 
by exploring the information in virtual space. The materials 
presented and public inputs collected through the virtual space 
are also synthesized for being used in the public meetings. This 
two-way information transfer between online public notice 
system and public meeting system 1s transparent and, ideally, 
should be automatic with little human intervention. The 
decision-making and participation workflows are a set of 
decision rules, actions, and predefined or ad-hoc procedures. 
Their roles are mainly to improve and automate existing 
decision-making processes with respect to public participation. 
While research is undergoing to develop GIS-based solutions 
for the two cases described above, the primary objective of the 
research reported here is to design and develop methods, 
software tools, and workflows to provide an online GIS- 
enabled virtual space for public participation in conducting 
class EA. Specific objectives of the research are to: 
e identify the most useful forms of geospatial data (e.g. 2D or 
3D) in relation to other types of information that would help 
the public participants to participate in EA study; 
identify the most important functional features of online GIS- 
enabled public notice systems for supporting easy access to 
and retrieval of EA study data; and 
develop the required methods, software tools, and workflows, 
and determine if their provision. would result in quality 
improvement and cost/time savings in consulting public input 
3.2 Design of GIS-enabled Public Notices 
Online GIS-enabled public notice systems, hereafter called 
GeoNotice, play two important roles: (1) notifying the public of 
upcoming public meetings and allowing the interested citizens 
to explore project information and become prepared for the 
public mecting; and (2) providing a platform for continuous 
soliciting of the public input and presentation of the final 
results. Comparing with time-limited public meeting sessions, 
this online notice system enables more citizens to participate in 
decision making process at a flexible period of time. 
À preliminary user requirement analysis, based on the literature 
review and initial contact with parities involved, indicates that 
GeoNotice needs to be accessed by city staff (proponents), 
consultants, citizens, and agency staff (Figure 3). In addition to 
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other requirements, the system must at least be capable of 
supporting the following four groups of public participation 
activities: 
e Notify: online public notices and automatic generation of 
the first-class mails and mailing 
e View and Exploration: exploring project documents and 
visualizing impacts on 2D/3D maps, 
perhaps with orthophoto or images overlaid , as well as 
interactively proposing new alternatives 
e Prioritization and Decision-making: prioritizing decision 
criteria, preferably multi-criteria, and making decisions 
accordingly 
e [nput and synthesis: collecting and summarizing public 
input in structured or unstructured formats. 
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GeoNotice is designed to manage multiple class EA study 
projects; hence raising the problem of managing documents 
and public input of different projects. One way to solve this 
problem is to organize all documents in different categories, 
including: (1) documents common to all projects (e.g. legal 
documents such as by-laws, EA acts, and general statistics); (2) 
documents common to a project (e.g., official plan in the area); 
(3) documents related to a particular phase of class EA study; 
and (4) documents containing public input (e.g., threaded 
comments, photos, and videos). Such organization allows casy 
management, sharing. and integration to class EA workflows. 
Ideally, each public participant should have his/her own 
workspace in GeoNotice systems which manages individual 
views, comments, added data (e.g., photos and documents), and 
output generated. Materials stored in individual workspace may 
be customized to generate individualized presentations (e.g. 
PPT presentation) that can be presented during public meetings 
by individual citizens for discussion. However, the realization 
of this capacity requires extensive computing resources of the 
system, and may ask for extra design effort to make sure it does 
not degrade citizen's empowerment with respect to the 
familiarity of technology and geography. 
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