ECOSENSUS (Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System) is an e-Social Science project, led by The Open University, UK (Systems Department and Knowledge Media Institute).
ECOSENSUS is investigating the sociotechnical issues around developing collaboration tools for participatory environmental decision making amongst (a) marginalised natural resource users in Guyana, (b) professional 'experts' from different countries, and (c) key decision makers associated with managing ecosystems. A secondary activity is to produce open content learning resources to train students to facilitate such forms of distributed environmental decision making.
This project aims to integrate a state of the art Geographical
Information System (uDig
) with
Compendium, in order to assist the Makushi Amerindian tribespeople, who
live in the Rupununi region of Guyana, to better negotiate, understand and
discuss their natural resource conservation and livelihood improvement needs, by
providing distributed decision-making support.
These facilities can of course be used by anyone who downloads the Ecosensus software (go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/ecosensus/ for more details).
In order to access the uDig support built into this version of Compendium you
must first turn on communications with uDig. You do this by going to the Tools
Menu > Options (Preferences) > Misc tab.
Figure 1. The Options dialog.
Now Compendium can receive incoming requests from uDig and can also send requests to uDig.
There are currently two messages that can be sent to uDig by the user and one that is sent by the system. The options that the user can access are found on The Node Right-Click Menu.
Open uDig Map
This option will only appear if the node clicked on was created from uDig and has the relevant uDig reference. (you can view this reference on the Node Properties panel.) If you select this option, and uDig is not running, Compendium will first attempt to start the uDig application. Once / if uDig is running, it will send a message to uDig to open the corresponding map and layer and highlight the icon point that the Compendium map was originally created from.
Add Label to Parent map point
This option will only appear if the node clicked is inside a map created from uDig which has the relevant uDig reference. If you select this option, and uDig is not running, Compendium will first attempt to start the uDig application. Once / if uDig is running, It will take the labels from all selected nodes and send them as properties to the icon point in uDig that the parent map node was originally created from. the node labels will only be sent if they have the correct format of some text=some other text, e.g. 'length=10' or 'colour=blue' etc.
Node Label Update
If you edit the node label of a map node that was originally created from uDig, Compendium will attempt to send uDig a label update message to update the label of the originating icon point. If uDig is not running, Compendium will first attempt to start the uDig application.
N.B. There is also an option on the Tools Menu to launch the uDig application manaully.