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Abstract
Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that can empower citizens in urban planning processes. The rise of the GeoWeb and the popularity of Web 2.0 collaborative tools can facilitate the development of a new generation of bottom-up Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms that can incorporate user-generated content into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). New service-based delivery mechanisms can provide architectural flexibility and adaptability, and enable the public to benefit from ubiquitous information access. From an e-participation perspective, Web 2.0 social networking functions support interactive communication among various PPGIS stakeholders, e.g., citizens, planners, and decision makers. The main contribution of this article is to present a reference architecture for e-planning platforms that (1) facilitates effective e-participation by allowing multidirectional map-based communication among various land development stakeholders (e.g., planners, decision makers, citizens, etc.), and (2) enables incorporation of visualization, evaluation, and discussion capabilities to support community planning processes. To achieve this, we developed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits SDI principles and Web 2.0 technologies. The platform architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functionality and tools, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to provide a planning and decision support platform. We present two real-world implementations of the proposed architecture that have been developed to support community engagement in the City of Calgary, Canada.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Canadian NEPTIS Foundation and GEOIDE (Grant TSII 202).
Notes
1. ‘Local’ in the sense of an SDI for a smaller, locally focused user community.
2. The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was adopted on 25 June 1998 in Aarhus, Denmark: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/welcome.html.
3. See http://www.opengeospatial.org.
4. According to Fischer and Herrmann (Citation2011), socio-technical platforms consider the interaction between people and technology. Generally speaking, they are composed of (1) computers, networks, and software, and (2) people, procedures, and policies, etc.
5. For example, workflow management systems such as Taverna (http://www.taverna.org.uk/) and service orchestration engines such as Apache ODE (http://ode.apache.org/) rely on a SOAP interface and a WSDL description to build complex workflows of services and to execute them, whereas OGC WPS must be wrapped in an additional WSDL layer if it is to be combined seamlessly with W3C workflows such as WS-BPEL (Granell Citation2014). Difficulties can arise with this process as the design of OGC WPS assumes some human intervention, whereas W3C services do not (Schade et al. Citation2012). The outcome is that WPS endpoints may not always translate directly, nor completely, to WSDL execution endpoints.
6. Spatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.
7. However, there are several approaches to extend data handling capabilities of W3C services, thus enabling binary data exchange (e.g., transferring images). See Zhang et al. (Citation2007) for a detailed discussion.
10. The WalkScore model is an implementation of walkscore.com’s model described in WalkScore (Citation2011). See Steiniger et al. (Citation2013) for a description of the WalkYourPlace, Cycling, Walking, and Transit & Walking models.