ParticipatoryGIS: A Web-based collaborative GIS and multicriteria decision analysis

Citizens are increasingly demanding greater public participation in shaping public policy decisions that affect their lives. A variety of participatory procedures exist that aim at involving the public and integrating the local knowledge and preferences with the scientific inputs of the experts within the decision process. However, the capabilities of traditional methods of public participation and collaboration are limited due to their synchronous and place-based nature. To facilitate effective public participation, the spatial planning and decision-making procedures should be collaborative and distributed over an extended period of time. The rapid improvements in the geographical information software and related computing hardware have made GIS the main tool for spatial planning and decision-making. Nonetheless, the progress in using GIS to improve public collaboration in spatial decision-making has been rather limited. GIS has typically been a centralized, exclusionary, expensive and technocratic tool requiring expert users in order to maintain effective and efficient operations. The system has been criticized as being an elitist technology that widens the gap between expert users and the general public when employed for planning and decision-making applications. The main challenges of GIS-based spatial decision-making applications reside in bridging this gap by providing a tool for enhancing public participation and addressing the issues of access and equity.;Keywords: WebGIS; Multicriteria evaluation; Spatial decision-making; Fuzzy majority; Collaborative decision-making; Consensus;Implementing GIS within the World Wide Web environment and integrating its capabilities with multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods can provide a mechanism for bridging the gap between the general public and experts. Web-based GIS (WebGIS) can offer solutions that are accessible to non-experts; moreover, online tools can provide an alternative to the traditional place-based planning as they do not require in-person attendance. Ultimately, by operating on the Internet, the access to GIS is not restricted by time or location. The main aim of this research is to design and develop a conceptual framework for a Web-based GIS-MCDA that supports public participation in collaborative decision-making and planning. The framework will integrate the deliberative and analytical dimensions of spatial decision-making in a unique and cohesive system to support distributed and asynchronous spatial collaborative decision-making. The framework, called ParticipatoryGIS, has been implemented within the Google Maps environment; it consists of two main elements supporting the deliberative and analytic components of the decision-making process. The deliberative part is based on the concept of argumentation maps; the analytic component consists of multicriteria decision analysis methods.