Abstract. Land use regulations are an important but often underrated legal domain. In densely populated regions such as the Netherlands, spatial plans have a profound impact on both (local) governments and citizens. This paper describes our work on a 'Legal Atlas'. Using Semantic Web technology we combine distributed geospatial data, textual data and controlled vocabularies to support users in answering questions such as "What activity is allowed here?". Spatial norms are represented using OWL 2 in a way that enables intuitive visualisation of their effects: map based legal case assessment. Users can represent a (simple) case by selecting or drawing an area on the map. Given a designation for that area, the system can assess whether this is allowed or not. The same solution also enables the comparison of two or more sets of spatial norms that govern the same region.

There are several reasons why citizens, businesses and civil servants need access to regulations. Unfortunately, traditional approaches that aim to provide this access fall short, especially in the area of spatial planning. Fairly straightforward questions such as "where will I be able to perform this kind of activity" or "is this activity allowed here" are not answered automatically by current systems. There are many attempts to create one-stop-shop front-ends to eGovernment, but these are seldom built from the perspective of the user.This paper describes our work on what we call a 'Legal Atlas'. Using various Semantic Web technologies we combine distributed geospatial data, textual data and controlled vocabularies in order to support users in answering questions such as those mentioned above.

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The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project DURP (Digital exchange of spatial plans) which develops an XMLbased digital exchange format for spatial regulations. Involvement in the DURP project offers new possibilities to test the feasibility of a machine readable regulative framework related to an object oriented representation of the real world such as the zoning plan. This marriage enables access to legal source through maps and vice versa. The combination supports increased transparency and delivery. We describe the combined architecture of the MetaLex XML schema for 'regular' legal sources that we developed in the past with geospatial regulatory information. We have developed a prototype viewer application and demonstrate how the spatial planning information in GML can be combined with MetaLex XML using the Web Ontology Language OWL.

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