Design of SDI to facilitate urban planning at local level

Abstract

Urban planning at local level is one of the important professions to affectively mange local issues like housing affordability, traffic congestion, crimes as well as global issues like pollution, global warming, environmental degradation etc. Being a multi disciplinary profession, urban planners and concerned decision makers relies heavily on appropriate and up to date information from different sources. However, in many cases, required information is difficult to collect and is in un-appropriate format leaving planners with two options: either to rely on available information or to collect it again by spending more resources both affecting quality of urban planning or better to say quality of our life.

Decision makers in different sectors started limited applications of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the form of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for spatial information management. But this traditional GIS was limited in spatial information sharing and its application indecision making and therefore, a new concept of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) emerged for effective and efficient information sharing and its application in decision making. But so far, most of the work relating to SDI is theoretical and no standard technical model of SDI for different scenario is available yet. This paper is focused on exploring the design of information model for local SDI mainly from urban planning perspective. This design is based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept allowing replicable use of services between different users, professional and decision makers. It will lead to successful development of local SDI with principle of collect once and use many times.