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GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES FOR E-MUNICIPALITY 2. PR 
In Tur! 
Halil AKINCI dat S 
"Insuffi 
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KTU, Geodesy and Photogrammetry Department, 61080 Trabzon, TURKEY - hakinci@ktu.edu.tr N a 
the go 
Commission IV, WG IV/2, ThS 6 Technical and Economic Aspects of Geospatial Information Services problen 
in Tur 
municif 
KEY WORDS: GIS, Internet/Web, Development, Interoperability, Web Service | and G2 
similar 
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ABSTRACT: | of the 
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Municipality activities require interoperability both between municipality offices, and government and private sector. Due to the | (RN 
lack of interoperability, traditional municipalities, and governments face serious problems. These are mainly poor quality and high context 
cost of services, and low economical revenues. E-municipality has been proposed for solving these problems. An interoperability | roblen 
infrastructure is at the heart of e-municipality and e-government applications. Web services have emerged as the next generation | From 
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of Web-based technology for interoperability. Web services are modular, self-describing, self-contained applications that are | mot han 
accessible over the Internet. Based on open standards, Web services enable to construct Web-based applications using any | n 
platform, object model, and programming language. Although Web services were initially suggested for e-business, they have | at 
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 motivation of this work was to determine the potentials of the Web services technologies for an interoperability infrastructure 
for e- municipality, and suggest Web services for municipalities to lower costs, improve service quality, and increase revenues in 
municipality. This is an urgent need especially for municipalities in Turkey. We have first examined major municipality activities 
for the municipality of Trabzon in Turkey. And identified possible geospatial Web services. We have also implemented some of 
these services using Cape Clear ™ Web Services development and deployment software. We have found out that Web services Dat 
have a great potential for c-municipality. Proces 
Service | 
1. INTRODUCTION 
E-government has been on the agenda of many developed and Web services have emerged as the next generation of Web- 
developing countries recently. Although the common sense based technology for interoperability. Web services are ; 
exists, a formal definition of “e-government” is not in place yet. 
World Bank defines e-government as the use of information 
and Communication Technologies (ICT) to transform 
government by making it more accessible, effective and 
accountable (World Bank, 2002). E-municipality can be 
defined as a municipality realizing all kind of communication, 
business and service offer in electronic envinronment. 
An interoperability infrastructure is at the heart of e- 
government (OeE, 2003). The ability by which the different 
applications can talk and cooperate with each other is known as 
interoperability. It is this infrastructure which would make the 
interaction between government and citizens (G2C), 
government and business enterprises (G2B), and inter-agency 
relationships (G2G) more friendly, convenient, transparent, and 
inexpensive (World Bank, 2002). Due to the lack of 
interoperability, traditional governments and municipalities 
face serious problems. These are mainly poor quality and high 
cost of services, and low economical revenues. E-government, 
and e-municipality has been proposed for solving these 
problems. 
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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). 
The motivation of this work was to determine the potentials of 
the Web services technology for an interoperability 
infrastructure for e-government and e-municipality. For this 
aim, we have first investigated the activities of the municipality 
of Trabzon, Turkey and determined the problems of the 
traditional system. Then we have determined, developed. and 
implemented a number of these services. We have concluded 
that Web services are very promising for the e-municipality 
infrastructure. Since e-government and e-municipality share 
similar structures and problems, the findings of this work 
would also be valid within the context of e-government.