Research Article Spatial Annotation Technology for Public Deliberation

Many public policies and decisions deal with geospatially expressed problems that are complex and controversial in nature. Broad participation of all interested parties in the form of deliberative dialogues is crucial to making trustworthy decisions. However, supporting deliberative dialogues on spatial problems places unique requirements for technology mediation that go beyond the current state of research on public participation geographical information systems (PPGIS) and related tech-nologies. In this article, we analyze the challenges of facilitating effective deliberation processes and highlight the progress needed to support spatially-enabled public deliberation technologies. Then, we present our GeoDeliberative Annotation Tech-nology (GeoDAT) as a framework for addressing the above challenges. GeoDAT uses spatial annotation objects as models for deliberative artifacts, and manages annotations by a spatial data model that reflects the ecological relationships among annotations, visual contexts, discussion threads, spatial referents, and the cognitive states of their holders. As a proof of the concept, we have implemented GeoDelib