Mobile Support for Team-Based Field Surveys

This paper describes a study of the use of multimedia networked location-aware mobile computers to support team-based survey-oriented fieldwork. Existing systems do not provide fully integrated support for collaborative data capture and review, or access to distributed real time information on survey progress and status, all of which are crucial for the conduct and management of surveys often carried out under inflexible time constraints. We developed a mobile system to address these shortcomings and performed an evaluation in an archaeological field survey, supporting over two-hundred data collection incidents over five days, and providing further insight into the field work data collection process.