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Environment-related authorisations are a relevant issue for environmental management. They require a considerable effort by the authorities, and this might result in substantial delays for the citizens. Implementing those authorisation processes by means of e-government services would improve efficiency and, consequently, citizen satisfaction. Environment-related authorisations usually require a variety of geospatial information, and have to deal with administrative areas which do not match physical and ecological ones. They also have to integrate heterogeneous information in different formats, data models and languages, and provided by distinct organisations, even from different countries. This paper discusses how Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) can deal with these problems in the environmental domain, while improving the level of service provision in terms of e-government applications. This is even more relevant within the European Union where there is a legal mandate to establish an SDI to support environmental policies and activities with an impact on the environment. As a proof-of-concept, an application to request and manage water abstraction authorisations, based on an SDI, is demonstrated. This application is part of SDIGER, a cross-border inter-administration SDI to support the water framework directive information access for the Adour-Garonne and Ebro River basins, that was a pilot project for the EU INSPIRE Directive. The introduction of this transactional e-government service modifies the administrative process of granting authorisations: it allows to re-use the effort in data capture made by the applicants in their requests, facilitates the submission of more feasible applications and reduces the workload of the office staff.

Integration between historical maps and current cartography is nowadays recognized of primary importance in many applications (e.g. urban planning, landscape valorisation and preservation, land changes identification). However, due to large variety in Geographical Information (GI) standards and interfaces for data publishing, some technical issues arise for developers when integrating different data for the generation of new web-based applications. In addition, information overload makes difficult their discovery and management: without knowing the specific repository where the data are stored, it is difficult to find the information required. To partially cope with those problems, this paper describes a new brokering-based approach for the generation of web applications based on multi-temporal GI data gathered from different providers. In particular, this new approach is exemplified by a couple of new web applications built on top of the developed solution. Even if the two applications deal both with historical maps, they present significant differences in technical (e.g. libraries, development environment, data formats) and non-technical (e.g. user addressed, user requirements) aspects showing the flexibility of the solution.

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