Last year we were playing around with websockets and we:

“…figured that an interesting use-case would to have a multi-user GIS where you can actually see where the other guy is, what he is seeing and together edit the map; think google-docs for map editing.”

We showed a first version of our application ‘cow’ (concurrent online webgis). Since then we’ve been expanding the possibilities. An obvious one is being able to add, edit and delete objects on the map; symbols, lines and polygons. We created a version where you could mark where the nature fire started with a portable device, that location would be shared over websockets and the nature fire model would calculate the spread of the fire and return the resulting time-polygons to all connected devices.

Another important possibility we explored was connecting Phoenix with websockets. This way you can expand Phoenix’ ‘same place, same time’ multi-user capabilities with ‘different place, same time’ collaboration. This could mean that someone in the field can see the results of discussions around the table as they are drawn into Phoenix on his smartphone or that different groups of experts in different countries all can contribute on the same map using multiple instances of Phoenix. What you see below is a combination of Phoenix with cow’s webviewer on a Windows 8 all-in-one PC, an Android tablet and an Android smartphone.