Separating law from Geography in GIS-based eGovernment services

Abstract

Abstract. The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen [DURP (http://www.vrom.nl/durp); digital exchange of spatial plans] which develops a XML-based digital exchange format for spatial regulations. Involvement in the DURP project offers new possibilities to study a legal area that hasnÕt yet been studied to the extent it deserves in the field of Computer Science & Law. We studied and criticised the work of the DURP project and the Dutch Ministry of internal affairs on metadata for regulatory documents, and made an inventory of issues related to legal knowledge representation that it felt were not sufficiently covered by current initiatives in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) field. This inventory was an input to the DURP standardisation effort. In a second phase of the project we extended the META Lex XML schema (cf. Boer et al. 2002;Boer et al. 2003) for 'regularÕ legal sources that we developed in the past for geospatial regulatory information, in order to support exchange of spatial regulations, including the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. We developed a prototype application and demonstrated how the spatial planning information in GML can be combined with XML with only minimal changes, using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This paper describes our experiences.

Reasoning with spatial plans on the semantic web

“…Of these regulations we need a representation of the areas they apply to (polygons on the map) and some representation of the norms in these regulations (what 4 Well known for other products than coffee. is allowed or disallowed in these areas, possibly with some restrictions or parameters like size or height or distance).…”

“…Quite distinct from ordinary maps, governments issue spatial plans not to describe the existing situation on the ground, but rather to prescribe the restrictions and rights associated with geospatial objects. The distinction between the legal perspective and geogra- phy in general was first explicitly advocated in [4]. Amongst others, they identify two important characteristics of a mapbased interface to regulations.…”

“…The first instalment of Legal Atlas [26,4] integrated three types of content: maps, metadata and regulation texts. A spatial plan was in essence a simple project file, that contained pointers to files that stored each type of content: a GML file for the map, several RDF/OWL files for metadata, and MetaLex XML files for the texts.…”

“…Such a combination allows the connecting of textual descriptions as in traditional legal sources, to the more object oriented representation of the world employed by the maps of zoning plans. The Legal Atlas [26,4] was the first system that combined MetaLex encoded texts with the corresponding maps expressed in GML 2 by using Semantic Web technology, RDF in particular. 3 In this paper we show that this proves a solid approach for extending the functionality of Legal Atlas well beyond straightforward information integration; i.e.…”

Spatial Planning on the Semantic Web

“…Such a combination allows the connecting of textual descriptions as in traditional legal sources, to the more object‐oriented representation of the world employed by the maps of zoning plans. The Legal Atlas (Boer et al. 2007, Winkels et al.…”