SPATIAL DATA BASED E-GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONS 
|. Baz*, I. R. Karas **, A. Geymen?, A. E. Akay ^ 
“ Gebze Institute of Technology (GIT) Department of Geodetic and Photogrammetric Engineering, 41400 Gebze 
? 
Kocaeli, Turkey — (ibaz, ragib, ageymen)@gyte.edu.tr 
? Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University (KSU), Faculty of Forestry, Department of Forest Engineering, 46060 
Kahramanmaras, Turkey - akay@ksu.edu.tr 
KEYWORDS: Cartography, Internet, Web based, Mapping, GIS, Virtual Reality, Spatial. 
ABSTRACT: 
E-government concept, defined as the use of information technologies (Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) 
that have the ability to transform relations between citizens, businesses, and other branch of the government, has been adopted by 
many government agencies. In general, there are two most important applications; interactive web maps that can be queried on 
Internet and spatial data based e-government information that can be accessed by the clients or public on the Internet. In Turkey, in 
spite of fact that non-spatial data based e-government applications have shown a great improvement, there has been little progress in 
spatial data based e-government applications. Effective use of Web-based e-government applications reduces user time, saves 
money, and increases efficiency. It is highly anticipated that interest in spatial data based applications will increase as many 
government agencies have been recently providing spatial data based services in Turkey. This paper discusses spatial data based e- 
government application being developed to allow the user to access e-government spatial information on the Internet. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
E-government can be simply defined as “continuous and safe 
execution of the mutual duties and the services between the 
government and the citizens in the environment of electronic 
communication and transaction" (Aktepe et al, 2002). Even 
though it is specified by its definition that e-government works 
in all kinds of electronic environment, the main platform of the 
e-government applications is the Internet because it is 
interactive, fast, well-known, and communal (Eraslan, 2003). 
The internet, which removes the boundaries of time and 
location, is a proper environment for information exchange. The 
unique feature of the internet is that someone can connect it 
from anywhere and at anytime; therefore, one-time generated 
data can be reached by many users (Karas, 2001). 
In Turkey, many of the government agencies have currently 
carry out their services on the Internet. Especially, due to 
improved relationships with the European Union (Aktepe et al., 
2002), e-government concept has been adopted by government 
agencies in more systematic and specified standards. There are 
wide variety of online operations including payments (bill, tax, 
etc.), bank transactions, customer services, job and school 
applications, insurance services, and library services. While 
there were only about 30 municipalities had a web site up until 
1999 (Yildiz, 1999), currently most of them have web sites. 
According to Aktepe et al. (2002), 109 out of 158 main 
government agencies have active web sites in which 4 of them 
provide only information, 24 of them provide electronic 
documents, and 81 of them provide intercommunication. 
The applications mentioned above deals with the non-spatial 
data, which can be organized and transferred on the internet 
environment by using classical web tools. However, many 
government agencies not only deal with non-spatial data but 
  
* Corresponding author. 
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also spatial data. There are two main types of web based GIS 
applications for spatial data based e-government applications 
over internet. The first type is online and interactive maps 
which can be used for spatial query, address search, route 
analysis, buffering, and overlaying analysis. The second type 
web based GIS application is transmitting the spatial documents 
of various agencies (cadastral administrations, local goverments 
and forestry, mining, water managing acencies, etc.) to their 
clients over the web. The contents of these documents include 
information such as land usage plans, landowner boundaries 
plans, construction permission plans. 
The numbers of e-government applications using non-spatial 
data have been continuously increasing, while few applications 
using spatial data have been conducted by the related 
government agencies. As more agencies provide spatial data 
based services, web based GIS applications will become more 
common in the near future. In this study, the structure of the 
web based GIS applications was investigated and web based 
interactive maps and the applications of developing parcel 
based spatial government documents were introduced. 
2. INTERNET BASED GIS 
The internet based interactive map was first presented by Xerox 
Alto Research Center in 1993. Following this presentation, the 
number of internet based GIS applications dramatically 
increased (Su et al., 1999). There are generally two main 
architectures of these applications: Thin Client and Fat Client 
(Abel et al., 1998). 
2.1. Thin Client 
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