Designing Access Control of a Spatial Decision Support System for Collaborative Maritime Spatial Planning

Abstract

Successful maritime spatial planning processes require stakeholder engagement and participation, thus requiring tools that support collaboration. Communication-driven spatial decision support systems are designed to facilitate decision making processes of complex spatial problems and are therefore suited for this task, but there are unresolved questions about user access control for these systems. In this study, user access control was designed for a spatial decisions support system for collaborative maritime spatial planning based on observation of two user tests. It was found that there were three distinct groups of users with special access needs to collaborative functionality. The level of access to functionality was organised into three groups: passive participants, actively contributing collaborators and managing moderators.