The process of urban building reviewing is a collaborative work by a group of urban planning staffs and land managers who are working with different departments of a or- ganization. There are three ingredients for improving the work efficiency, i. e.,agile commu- nication and interactive mechanisms, good information, effective processing and visualizing tools. In order to build a computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) system in Urban Planning and Land Administration Bureau in Changzhou Municipality, GIS was integrated with office automation (OA). The workflow and organizational structure had been re-engi- neered to meet the requirement of application of the new technology. Federated databases were constructed by assembling disparate sources of heterogeneous spatial and attribute data. Easy access to the data by contents was developed for promoting information sharing within the organization. Specific desktop spatial data handling tools were provided for delineating 1and lots or building layouts on large-scale digital maps. Office automation functions, includ- ing applications registering, reasonableness checking, opinions giving and exchanging, were developed and they permit printing and documents filing. The work efficiency in the organi- zation has been improved by introducing the computer-based collaborative building reviewing system.
