Geographic information
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eGovernment solution: geographic information
Some information cannot be represented other than on a map. This kind of geographic information is used in spatial planning and building permits. Geographic Information Systems are becoming very basic tool for the support of government operations.
Spatial information is represented using points and lines. These vectors are meaningless. But groups of vectors create objects such as houses, areas, roads, parks. These basic spatial objects together make up a village, town, region or nation and are subject to all kinds of regulation.
Standards are the basis of GIS systems, such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).
A good treatment of GIS can be found here.
Many policy decisions and regulations have spatial consequences. Noise regulation, polution, zoning policy, building permits, urban development and cultural heritage all have spatial consequences and may need maps to be represented.Maps differ to text in the sense that maps have the ability to literally create a "picture" of decision parameters. Maps that are build on the base of geo-datawarehouses represent information on different aspects of policies from the database into a coloured representation layer which you see as a coloures area on the screen.The coloured layering presents a way to compare policies and priorities that text have a hard time to convey. It takes an effort to compare three documents containing 60-plus pages of policy language, while the map creates a coloured picture of the same information.
Maps are increasingly becoming a part of our lives since th eemergence of tools like car navigation (TomTom) and of course, Google Earth. The notion of legal and administrative constraints projected on a map has its origin in the Addwijzer project that created the first version of The "Legal Atlas". The second version enabling a maintainable version of the legal constraints was based on metalex and OWL/RDF technologies build by the Dutch Ministry of Space and the University o Amsterdam
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