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GIS as enabling technology for an information environment in public administration

Monika HeidemannFraunhofer-Institut für Graphische DatenverarbeitungRundeturmstr. 664283 Darmstadt

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OverviewIntroduction

• Situation of Information Technology in the EU

• Situation of Administration• Use of GIS in Administration

Architecture• Requirements of the IT-system• Architecture• Scenario of a soil-protection system• Architecture of the soil-protection system• Three-tier-architecture• Data Management

Example• Common GIS

Conclusion

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Situation of Information Technology in the EU

Goals

• availability of information and data as a fundamental criterion of competitiveness in the market

• improved information flow to increase effectiveness

• frontier crossing communication by the use of information systems

Obstacles

• standards and rules impeded the availability and exchange of data

• significant backlog in comparison to the USA

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Situation of Administration

explosion of data stored in administrative databases

huge heterogenous data sets

knowledge is hidden in distributed large data amounts

quality of data differs considerably

existing systems suffer in a lack of user-friendliness and effectiveness

lack in transparency for the citizen

low budgets

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Use of GIS in Administration

between 80 and 85% of all data have spatial reference (e.g. coordinates, addresses)

growing information potential in geographic information systems

GIS no longer limited to a small group of professionals

advantages:

• redundancy in work and expenses may be reduced

• optimized decision finding processes

• spatial analyses of measured data

• optimized information flow between departments

• common information source for civil servants and also citizens

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Requirements of the IT-system

easy access to the heterogeneous data and information

user-friendly interfaces

selection, procession, transformation and visualization of data

result evaluation and documentation

combining of different diciplines

exploiration of knowledge about several integrative disciplines

serve to multiple users

fast data retrieval

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Architecture

PC-based client/server technology

• wide distribution of data and information

server-centric system

• all process will be carried out on the server side

• functions and data will be transmitted on demand

• the system will not be stressed unnecessary

client-centric systems

• applications perform the processes to the clients

• not suitable for large amount of data

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Scenario soil-protection system of one ministry in Germany

different departments are linked

• Waste Management

• Offices of Water Supply and Distribution

• Cadastral and Surveying Offices

Geo Base Data

• Automated Property Register

• Automated Property Map

huge amount of structured and unstructured data

quality of applicable data differs considerably

no use of several data stock without previous preparation

plenty of rules, restrictions and standards to be observed

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Architecture of the soil-protection system combination of GIS and Internet

• simple and transparent distribution of geo-related data

• security mechanisms (different ID´s)

simultaneous access to the common data sets

3-tier-architecture

• client, middleware, server

application server realizes the access to the database and keeps the business logic

not only visual data but also topology, master data etc. is available

transparency and user-friendliness by use of a meta-information-system

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Three-tier-architecture

1. Tier: Data Base Server

2. Tier:Application Server

3. Tier:Internet Client

........ ....

....

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Data Management working in different data sources

metadata overcome the problem of interpreting the heterogeneous sources

modern software system consists of more or less independent components

• meet special requirements

• communicate with other components of the system

• particular components act autonomously

examples of components

• geo-coding

• waste deposits

• intelligent visualization

• analysis module

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Data Management II quality is enhanced by different highly

specialized componentes which can easily be replaced

essential to have defined user-interfaces for each component

Interface Definition Language (IDL)

• user interface specification

• independence of user interfaces and implementation of functionality

communication between the components is performed by using CORBA

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Data Management III each component is working on a well-definded data-

stock

autonomous administration will lead to redundancy and related consistence problems

there are special components for data administration, the data manager

each information community use their particular data model - the virtual data model

virtual data model access the original data sources via data server interfaces

components must specifiy which virtual data model they should use in order to get reasonable data

automatic integration of data sources into the virtual data model by means of meta-data

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Example - Common GIS goal: access and usability of geo-data

for everyone from everywhere

visualization techniques in form of maps and statistical graphs

remote access to geo-data

easy analysis of generated maps

specification of data sets and design of visualizations by its own

the system calculates the chosen statistical presentation

guides the user by using special interaction targets

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ExampleRationale for offering multiple presentations: Different visualization techniques enable different analysis tasks

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Why?

Selection of table data

Automatic generation of maps

Numeric data

Amounts

Intelligent structure of

data

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Visualisation design

Conceptual description of the

thematic data

Map designer

Client Server

selected columns

Presentation manager

map specification

Rule base on map design

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Dominantreligion

Inflationrate

Totalpopulation

Numberof women

Numberof men

Catholic medium 3 413 904 1 658 759 1 755 145Orthodox high 7 986 664 4 145 403 3 841 261Protestant low 1 625 399 863 499 761900

Data variables:

nominal ordinal numeric numeric numeric

is a part of

are comparable

Combinations of graphical elements:

enables comparisons

disables comparisons

emphasizes inclusion

enable estimation of sums and proportions ....

Level ofperception

Size Value Color Shape

quantitative ordered selective associative

Visual variables:

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Pie-chart test of “Intelligence”

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Conclusion

access to geo data even by non-experts

interaction between users via Internet

commercial GIS meet general requirments

special demands by programming

transfer of software and consultancy know-how to member states

focus on new technologies

• wearable GIS

• 3D-GIS