Geospatial web services for e-municipality

Abstract

Municipality activities require interoperability both between municipality offices, and government and private sector. Due to the lack of interoperability, traditional municipalities, and governments face serious problems. These are mainly poor quality and high cost of services, and low economical revenues. E-municipality has been proposed for solving these problems. An interoperability infrastructure is at the heart of e-municipality and e-government applications. Web services have emerged as the next generation of Web-based technology for interoperability. Web services are modular, self-describing, self-contained applications that are accessible over the Internet. Based on open standards, Web services enable to construct Web-based applications using any platform, object model, and programming language. Although Web services were initially suggested for e-business, they have collected a great interest from various communities. Recently, they became a current issue for developing distributed applications and sharing geospatial data between GIS communities. GIS data and application providers can develop geospatial web services, and share their information over the Internet using Web services. The motivation of this work was to determine the potentials of the Web services technologies for an interoperability infrastructure for e- municipality, and suggest Web services for municipalities to lower costs, improve service quality, and increase revenues in municipality. This is an urgent need especially for municipalities in Turkey. We have first examined major municipality activities for the municipality of Trabzon in Turkey. And identified possible geospatial Web services. We have also implemented some of these services using Cape Clear TM Web Services development and deployment software. We have found out that Web services have a great potential for e-municipality.