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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B4. Istanbul 2004
government agencies, private sector, or municipality
departments.
A ZPF geometrically shows the location of a land parcel in
relation to the zoning plan, and includes construction
conditions of the zoning plan block that covers the parcel. In
other words, a ZPF includes both graphics and text data.
Graphics data comes from the cadastral map and the zoning
plan while text data comes from the zoning plan and land title
data are graphics data. Laying out a ZPF, involves bringing
all these data together. In Turkey, these data are maintained
by different government and municipality offices. Cadastral
and Land Title data are under the responsibility of Cadastre
Offices (CO) and Land Title Offices (LTO), which are
separate Central Government organizations. Zoning plan data
is handled by the ZPO of municipalities.
A ZPO officer who has access to a data-centric NSDI has to
perform the following steps to generate a ZPF:
1. Connect to the CO web site
2. Search for the layer containing the parcel of
interest. This can be eased by a query tool.
3. Transfer the entire layer in an import format
supported by the server site
4. Add the imported layer to the client application.
User has to browse through the windows explorer.
So, he has to remember where he had put the
imported file.
5. Clip the parcel
6. Connect to the LTO web site
7. Search for the related LTO data. This can be eased
by a query tool.
8. Retrieve the related data.
9. Combine the results of the steps 5 and 8 into the
ZPF form.
The ZPO officer would have to carry out each step, one after
another, spending considerable amount of time to accomplish
the task. This is in no ways an acceptable solution.
3.2 Implementing NSDI with Web Services
It is our view that the emergence of Web services has
necessitated a major shift in both the vision and
implementation of NSDIs. Because, NSDIs have originally
been envisioned for “sharing data”. And they have been
implemented with the existing Web technology which was
the “human-centric” web. The idea was to provide users with
a metadata based scarch to discover the data and
~~ Municipality
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ZPO Server . Web Services
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Web Services
getParcelGeometry
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LTO Server
Web Services
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A LTO Database
Figure 3. Interoperating Web services of the ZPO, CO, and LTO servers.
let them transfer the data in a data format. This is not an
acceptable solution for mainly two reasons. First, as explained
above, it is not easy to find what one wants in the human-centric
Web. Second, it is not easy to transfer data from some other
system and integrate it to the application at hand. This is also
because of two reasons. First, spatial data exchange has always
been problematic due to the disagreement over a single
exchange format. Second, even if there is no problem in
exchanging spatial data, attribute data integration is generally
troublesome and therefore tackled separately from the spatial
data. This can be. noticed from the workflow of the ZPF
scenario above: Searches in the steps 4 and 7 are for spatial and
attribute data respectively.