1133 
ENTERPRISE GIS FOR MUNICIPALITIES - A SERVICE ORIENTED APPROACH 
F. Samadzadegan 3, *, S. Saeedi 3 , A. Alvand b and M. Hasanlou b 
department of Geomatics Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran - 
(samadz, ssaeedy)@ut.ac.ir 
b MAS Research and Development Company, Tehran, Iran - 
(alvand, hasanlou)@mas-rd-co.com 
Commission IV, WG IV/5 
KEY WORDS: Municipal Infrastructure, Enterprise GIS, Geo Web Service, Service Oriented Architecture, Distributed Geo-DB. 
ABSTRACT: 
Enterprise Geographical Information Systems (EGISs) provide municipal governments with extraordinary quantitative and 
qualitative benefits. A municipal EGIS consists of technology, personnel, and other resources to create, maintain, visualize, search, 
and share geospatial data and services. At a minimum, the municipal EGIS provides these capabilities to all departments of the 
municipality. Usually the municipal EGIS extends many of these capabilities to the general public, external private entities, and 
external public agencies as well. EGIS is a fundamental element of e-govemment because it adds the critical elements of location and 
visualization to interaction between the municipal departments and the public. Often knowing where a government action or other 
event in the community is occurring, as well as what is nearby, is essential for achieving informed public participation and timely 
delivery of services. However, in traditional situation of municipalities, it is not possible for individual standalone services to meet all 
the service requirements of many users. Such service requests could be met by dynamically chaining multiple services provided by 
single and multiple service providers. In this paper we propose a Service Oriented Approach for developing an EGIS for 
Municipalities. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) recognizes this and tries to construct a distributed, dynamic, flexible, and 
re-configurable service system over Internet that can meet information and service requirements of many different users. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Newly developed technologies have made it possible to create 
an enterprise GIS for municipalities which combine custom 
geospatial and attribute data with spatial and non-spatial models 
and functionality from Geo web services in a service oriented 
architecture (Farrell, 2006 ; Liuand and Fan, 2007 ; ESRI, 2007). 
Change in software architecture has led to the emergence of 
enterprise software that will reduce costs and vastly improve 
integration. Through the emergence of integrity and 
interoperability standards, business application vendors no 
longer need to buy and deploy multiple GIS technologies and 
maintain multiple versions of the same GIS data to suit specific 
needs of departmental systems (Figueroa and Stusek, 2001; Tu 
et. al, 2004; Yang et. al, 2005; ESRI, 2007). 
A comprehensive enterprise municipal GIS should provide a 
common platform for data collection, storage, authorized and 
secure access to spatial and non-spatial data, harmonize the 
work flow of respective departments and disseminate 
information for the benefit of E-Municipalities. One of the main 
goals of E-Municipalities is improving the quality of public 
services through the use of information and communication 
technology (ICT) to their customers. The external customers are 
considered to be citizens (G2C), businesses (G2B), non-profit 
organizations (G2N), and public administrations (G2G). The 
public services are categorized into information, communication 
and transaction services. Criterion for this categorization is the 
degree of process automation and interaction. The most services 
offered belong to the information category like making forms 
available. The advantage is that citizens don't have to pass to the 
public office, and as a benefit saving time and money. In 
addition, a lot of information on how to fill in that form is made 
available. Information services are not intended to have access 
to internal data like personal or social information. The platform 
providing information services are based on content 
management systems (CMS) (Figueroa and Stusek, 2001). 
2. CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE GIS IN 
MUNICIPALITY OF METROPOLISES 
Traditionally, IT’s ability to deliver in most of municipality of 
metropolises is hindered by fragmented and complex 
infrastructures including disjointed legacy systems and 
packaged applications, a large proportion of which were never 
designed for information interoperability, integration, and reuse. 
Consequently, most of the IT budget goes into maintenance of 
the current infrastructure and only a small percentage is 
available for supporting new business initiatives (ESRI, 2007). 
The major portion of budget for new capabilities goes into 
integrating new functionality into the existing systems. 
The field that has grown up around reliable 
among distributed computers in municipalities, especially in 
municipality of metropolises, is called Enterprise Application 
Integration (EAI). EAI is both a concept and a group of 
products. EAI refers to the process of linking large systems 
together. It is also a label that applies to a number of different 
software products, such as Tibco and webMethods, which 
provide interfaces between the distributed computers (Figueroa 
and Stusek, 2001). Enterprise GIS model for municipal 
planning can be best described as a series of activities that focus 
on common GIS requirements of participating public and 
private organizations. 
Web services stand to make a significant impact on simplifying 
EAI and reducing or even eliminating the need for proprietary