International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B2. Istanbul 2004
effect the construction business and related sectors for instance.
On the other hand, low efliciency will yield poor quality
services.
Quality of Services: Quality of services not only causes
dissatisfaction of citizens with their government or
municipality, but also results in economical losses. Several
problems may be associated with the quality of government and
municipality services. The main problem stems from the lack of
how a service should be. In the traditional way, citizens are
perceived as, in a sense, a “worker” of the services. Because,
traditionally and even backed by the regulations, almost all
government agencies and municipalities ask citizens to collect
some of the data needed for their applications. And this is the
data that government agencies and municipalities could have
obtained from each other if there had been an interoperability
infrastructure such as NSDI in place. This view of services is
far behind the implications of “Information Age". Similarly,
citizens have to declare and then pay their taxes by traditional
means. Like in the case of many other services, this puts a
heavy burden on citizens who have to visit several government
or municipality departments, wait in the long lineups spending
their times with frustration. This is rather annoying and has
been the subject of prevailing complains all over the Country.
This has also side effects. For instance, due to such frustrations,
some citizens do not bother with declaring their taxes at the
first place. And this is one of the reasons of high tax losses.
Another aspect of the quality of services is related to the Public
participation in governance. Let alone the participation, the way
of informing citizens about government and municipality
decisions is rather clumsy at the moment. A characteristic
example of this is proclaiming the zoning plan modifications to
the citizens from a bulletin board where citizens may hardly see
their parcels and related owner information. Such modifications
arise as a result of some special zoning plan applications in
Turkey.
Economical losses: These are the result of the problems in the
other categories. As already explained, one of these problems
are the lack of auto-control as in the case of real estate taxes.
And the rather one is the rather slow pace of activities as in the
case of building permits.
Cost of services: There are many causes of high costs in
traditional governments. First of all, due to the lack of
interoperability, development and production costs are high.
For instance, data transfers between municipalities and other
parties and between different offices within the same
municipality are still performed by traditional methods. As very
well documented in the literature, this is a costly and time-
consuming operation. As an example, the rate of using Internet
for data transfer between municipalities and government
agencies or private sector is very low at the moment. There are
even cases where one has to actually travel to another city and
get the data. On the other hand, due to insufficient and
improper use of ICT, more than needed personnel are employed
in municipalities in Turkey.
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3. GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES FOR
E-MUNICIPALITY
Web services have emerged as the next generation of Web.
based technology for interoperability. Web services are
modular, self-describing, self-contained applications that are
accessible over the Internet. Based on open standards, Web
services enable constructing Web-based applications using any
platform, object model, and programming language (Barefoot,
2002). A service is a collection of operations accessible through
an application-programming interface that allows users to
invoke a service, which could be a response to a simple request
to create a map or a complicated set of image-processing
operations running on several computers (Hecht, 2002). There
are many other definitions of web services in the literature. It
suffices to say that these definitions have some points in
common. First, web services are for application-to-application
communication. Second, web services are accessed over
Internet. And Finally, web services are XML based and not for
proprietary solutions.
Although Web services were initially suggested for e-business,
they have collected a great interest from various communities.
Recently, they became a current issue for developing
distributed applications and sharing geospatial data between
GIS communities. GIS data and application providers can
develop geospatial web services, and share their information
over the Internet using Web services.
The activities of Zoning Plan Office, and Map and Cadastre
Office working with spatial data were examined during the
Studies carried out in Trabzon municipality. Required Web
services were designed for the activities of these office units.
Web services for preparing zoning plan form were
implemented by using Cape Clear Professional 4 Web services
development and deployment software (Figure 3).
The Web services in Table 2 were designed for ZPO and MCO
to realize the activities in Table | by using Web services.
Required Web services both in ZPO and MCO, and other
government offices’ servers that are providing data for
performing activities are given in Table 2. Detailed information
about all ZPO and MCO Web services can be found in Sahin
(2003).
Inter
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