Full Paper

We present findings from a qualitative study of the spatial practices of biological fieldwork. We argue that these fieldwork practices inform a vision of decentralized spatial annotation in which a variety of motivations, needs, and perspectives coexist, and may support each other synergistically. We contrast this with current and past designs of mobile spatial annotation systems in the literature. From our analysis we identify three guidelines for mobile annotation systems design in biological fieldwork that we argue also extend to other domains: allowing the management of space through user control over annotation processes, promoting structured but flexible annotation through user-defined annotation formats, and providing robust and comprehensive integration of disparate data sources to allow ad hoc, exploratory queries.