An intelligent geoportal for spatial planning

Abstract

The main idea of the INSPIRE directive, establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe, is to remove barriers in using and sharing official spatial data by various groups of users (common, commercial, administrative) and avoid redundancy in the data sets. A side effect of the directive, which was originally oriented on establishing better conditions for the implementation of environmental strategy in the European Union, is an information and knowledge exchange between users with different backgrounds and interests. From the technical point of view, the nodes of the information infrastructure are distinguishable, autonomous parts of the complex system built on the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm. The nodes deliver services that can be combined according to particular needs and integrated on a service bus. A consumer of a service can be both a human accessing services by running a web application, or a machine that connects to the service provider automatically while executing its own process. However, accessing information by the humans can be difficult, if the applications they use do not offer a friendly GUI, hiding behind it all the details of processing. Development of spatial information infrastructures started with data-centric spatial data infrastructures (SDI 1.0), then evolved into service-centric SDIs (SDI 2.0), and then into user-centric SDIs (SDI 3.0). Thus, the user-centric point of view is the one that focuses on how to build the solution that fulfills user needs, rather than on how the data are organized and structured. The authors present here the concept of an intelligent geoportal, which can be seen as a gate to the SDI tuned at fulfilling particular user needs - the needs of spatial planners. The solution proposed uses semantic technologies to support users and meet their specific requirements.