Development of a Geo-Portal for E-Land Use Information Management

Development of a Geo-Portal for e-Land Use Information Management

Nguyen Xuan Thinh1 and Clemens Deilmann1

Abstract This paper describes the development of a Geo-Portal for e-Land Use Information Management in the context of the e-City Platform. Our work has been conducted as a contribution to the work package WP 4 “e-Land Use Information Management” of the project INTELCITIES which addresses the EU policy objective of the “Knowledge Society” by 2010 in the context of cities by developing an integrated citywide information system continuously accessible to all (planners, developers, politicians, designers, engineers, transport and utility service providers and individual citizens) that will enable more inclusive decision-making and support more sustainable life-styles. First our paper is broadly concerned with monitoring urban regeneration in eastern Germany. We then discuss the importance of Geo-Portals for the process of monitoring urban regeneration. Finally we present the concept and the implementation of the Geo- Portal for e-Land Use Information Management in Dresden City Region as the “Demonstrator Dresden”.

1. Introduction The main objective of INTELCITIES is to create a new and innovative set of interoperable e-government services to meet the needs of both citizens and businesses. This will provide interactive citywide on-line applications and services for users that will make all aspects of what is “going-on” in the city available to all. This will support: (1) the everyday needs and requirements of citizens and business through 24 hour access to transactional city services; (2) more efficient city management and administration by integrating functions and services across city authorities, regional and national governmental agencies, utility and transport system providers and citizens; (3) much more innovative and effective approaches to urban planning through more reliable city modelling, using advanced visualisation and predictive techniques, which will enable citizens and businesses to play a far more participative and inclusive role in influencing how planned changes in the city will affect their lives. The project brings together 18 cities, led by Manchester and Siena, with 20 ICT companies including Nokia, Microsoft and CISCO and 36 research groups to pool advanced knowledge and experience of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe. It will help achieve the EU policy goal of the “Knowledge Society” by 2010 through new forms of electronic governance of cities and greater social inclusion through enhanced access to services by citizens and businesses. There are 16 thematic areas within INTELCITIES, one is “e-Land Use Information Management”. This work package (WP 4) has to define the service architecture that guarantees interoperability of services, accessibility and protection of data. The project will work towards the harmonization of the structure of geographic information for land use planning systems across EU25. It will support new added-value-services for admini- strations, enterprises and citizens, for instance: Producers of Geo-data (like municipalities, surveyors, council services, architects) will be able to offer enriched Geo-data in the form of value-added-services via the internet. Geo-data providers will be able to build collections of value-added-services offering them to

1 Leibniz-Institute of Ecological and Regional Development (IOER), Weberplatz 1, D-01217 Dresden, [email protected] & [email protected], Internet: http://www.ioer.de

829 investors or any participants in the urban planning process. In order to challenge the future e-city-platform with real use cases, the WP 4 team has chosen 3 cases with specific objectives: • Use case Berlin: Remote sensing (airborne / satellite) to support a future landuse-change-observatory. Objective is the detection of biodiversity losses within green areas of Berlin Pankow and the “illegal” take of garden land allotments for residential purpose. • Use case Dresden: The “Urban Regeneration-East” program “Stadtumbau Ost” supported by government funds asks for a Monitoring report. The program applies to shrinking cities. The questions are linked to the regional development of the housing sector. Therefore the evaluation needs a cross border comparison between municipalities. A web based data exchange is planned for the future. The case will be implemented in the e-city-platform. • Use case Warsaw: The surrounding municipalities are under investment pressure. Some are fast grow- ing. The case will evaluate by GIS-tools the development paths along two sustainability indicators. Fo- cus is the accessibility of citizens to public transport- and shopping facilities. Our paper focuses on the development of a Geo-Portal for the monitoring of urban regeneration in Dres- den, Freital, Heidenau and Pirna (Use case Dresden). Geo-Portals are World Wide Web gateways that organise content and services such as directories, search tools, community information, support resources, data and applications (Maguire & Longley 2005). Geo-Portals are a key element of international global spatial data infrastructure and e-Government.

2 Urban Regeneration in Eastern Germany and Dresden City Region Since reunification in 1990, eastern Germany has lost about one million people (Fig. 1) and more or less all eastern German cities have dramatically lost population and workplaces. Theses cities are confronted with massive processes of “shrinkage” in urban development (Müller 2003, Glock & Häußermann 2004, Hannemann 2004). Shrinking is specially reflected in depopulation, deindustrialisation, and vacancies in buildings, housing units and commercial spaces. It was estimated that more than one million housing unit in eastern Germany were empty in 2000 (see Tab. 1). In 2001 the federal state launched a subsidy program “Stadtumbau Ost”, where cities can apply for more than 1.1 billion euros funding for the next eight years to address the vacant housing problem (Glock & Häußermann 2004).

Saxony Eastern Germany

4800 16200 4750 16000 4700 4650 15800 4600 15600 4550 15400 4500 4450 15200 Population in thousand in Population 4400 in Population thousand 15000 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 Year Year

Fig. 1: Population development in Saxony and Eastern Germany 1990-2000 Source: Statistical Office of the Free State of Saxony 2004, Federal Statistical Office Germany 2004

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Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6 Tab. 1: Housing units and vacancies in eastern Germany and Saxony, 1998 (Source: SAB 2001, Glock & Häußermann 2004, Effenberg & Deilmann 2004)

Total stock (000s) Vacant stock (000s) Vacant units (%) Eastern Saxony Eastern Saxony Eastern Saxony Germany Germany Germany One- and two-family houses 2 496 676 177 52 7.1 7.7 Multi-storey dwellings 4 794 1 601 782 330 16.3 20.6 All housing units 7 290 2 277 959 382 13.2 16.8

Urban regeneration aims to a comprehensive restructuring of the physical neighbourhood in cities and towns on the basis a multiplicity of actions of the local stakeholders (planning authority, housing enterprises, supply enterprises, and citizens). Today, many eastern German cities stand at the beginning of a long regeneration process. Nobody can foresee the development exactly. Prognoses can model the future development only approximately. It is the more important to monitor the real development in order to be able to react in time to changed conditions. The potential importance of a longitudinal approach in evalu- ating housing renewal and urban regeneration has been by raised Rosenburg & Watkins (1999). Hutter & Wiechmann (2005) highlight urban regeneration as a strategic process. Strictly speaking, monitoring in urban regeneration is an indicator-based instrument for the evaluation of successes and efficiency of the program “Urban Regeneration-East”. In the broader sense, it is an instrument for monitoring of urban development processes and for decision support in urban planning. The goals of monitoring are (Bunde- stransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost 2004): • To analyse and to make visible the prevailing changes in towns and cities, • To provide an evaluation of successes and efficiency of the urban regeneration programme or projects, • To support the update of urban planning concepts by well-founded information bases. The municipalities have the interest and are accountable to the Federation and Country and to document the use and success of the allocation of subsidies in the urban regeneration. Monitoring is to be conducted on the two differentiated levels: • The overall urban view and • The area monitoring of identified district areas which are to restructure. The project group “Urban Regeneration of the Dresden City Region” has elected Dresden, Freital, Heide- nau and Pirna as demonstration municipalities for the programme “Urban Regeneartion-East”. Radebeul is not included because Radebeul does not have the vacancy problem. According to two monitoring levels two types of investigation area have been differentiated: • Investigation area A: 4 municipalities (overview) • Investigation area B: 15 district areas in Dresden and 10 further in the neighbour municipalities which are to restructure. It cannot be expected that the neighbour municipalities use the same indicators as Dresden. Therefore we have to select 6 indicators and try to carry out a rough analysis. (1) Housing stock: - one- and two-family houses, - Multi-storey dwellings, - Percent of buildings with the year of construction before 1919

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Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6 (2) Percent of vacant housing units (3) Percent of unemployed persons and paupers (welfare recipients) (4) Settlement density of households per gross housing country (5) Accessibility of public transport network (number of inhabitants in the 300-m-circle of connect and stopping points) (6) Use of subsidies

3. Development of a Geo-Portal for Monitoring of Urban Regeneration The Web GIS application will address the issue that there is little or no cross-departmental exchange of information in the public sector and aims to enable the municipalities involved, to exchange spatial data mutually, to look at maps of urban regeneration measures and even to accomplish comparisons over internet. In particular, the ability for the spatial synopsis and to retrieve information of measures for the urban regeneration of the municipalities involved are of importance. It will allow the municipalities to pursue the dynamic of the urban development as well as to document the use of subsidies and its success. Conse- quently, users can compare the influence of the varying measures of the participating municipalities re- garding their effect. Apart from the visualization and the information retrieval, also direct data exchange will be provided in the future. The ability to exchange georeferenced data brings a substantial advantage compared to the conventional function, the exchange of analogue maps. In a strict sense, Geo-Portal may be defined as a web site where the discovery of geographic content is a primary focus (see Tait 2005). Today, implementation of Geo-Portals is based on distributed GIS technol- ogy. Tait (2005) identified three components of a Geo-Portal, their relationships to one another, the ena- bling technologies and standards with which they are implemented, and finally the key functions implemented and used by a Geo-Portal application (Tab. 2).

Tab. 2: Geo-Portal Architecture (Source: Tait 2005)

Components Elements Environments Functions

HTML, HTTP, XSL, XML, Search, Map Viewer, Publish, Web Site JSP, ASP Administrate Web Portal Java Beans, .NET Query, Gazetteer, Mapping Web Controls Edit, Geocoding

XML, SOAP, WSDL Query, Map render/feature, Web Services Geographic Web Services WMS, WFS, GML Transaction, Geocode

Data Management DBMS SQL Raster, Vector, Tabular

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Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6 3.1 Concept of a Geo-Portal for Monitoring Urban Regeneration According to the client server architecture we suggested a decentralized storage concept, i.e. the GIS data remain decentralized stored in the computer centres of the municipalities (Dresden, Freital, Heidenau and Pirna). For this purpose, a spatial database has to be established and additional Web GIS software has to be installed on the web servers of the municipalities. All functionalities are provided by a central service. This service has to be developed, configured and maintained by the IT partner of the project. Among available functionalities, apart from visualization and information retrieval, the import and export of GIS data in different data formats should be possible by using FME (Feature Manipulation Engine). Thus the central service will enable the interoperability of different GIS used by the municipalities (Dresden: YADE, ArcGIS; Freital: POLYGIS; Heidenau: ArcGIS; Pirna: MicroStation). The procedure for the generation of the querying result is to be subdivided into several steps. If a user with his web browser performs an inquiry against the central service, the latter queries all necessary data from the decentralized storages and generates according to the inquiry maps, tables as well as down-loadable geodata. The central service should besides differentiated access control mechanisms make available. While visualization and information retrieval should be accessible for external users also, the export and in particular the import of the GIS data is reserved exclusively to a defined user group. The quality of the available data must be ensured by permanent updating of the GIS data in the local geodatabases. With this concept, the participating municipalities are confronted with a high expenditure for the supply and updating of the data.

3.2 Implementation and some Conclusions At the project time not all municipalities meet the necessary technical requirements. Therefore we have to host the geodata (borders of municipalities and identified urban regeneration areas, settlement, rivers, attribute tables of indicators) of Freital, Heidenau and Pirna in the firms GEOTASK Basel and SRP Berlin (our IT project partners). The data of indicators for Freital, Heidenau, and Pirna are partly just an estimate.

Fig. 2: One web site of the Demonstrator Dresden

Our IT project partners implemented the following functionalities for the Geo-Portal (Demonstrator Dres- den, see Fig. 2): search and find distributed services; get maps/layers from distributed sources and overlay

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Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6 them; map navigation; get attribute data related to a spatial feature; capture new spatial features and attribute data; analyse information; and generate thematic maps. During the work we were confronted with a lot of obstacles: gaps in spatial data including missing or in- complete data; a lack of documentation including metadata that limits the reuse of data; incompatibility of spatial datasets that restricted the ability to combine multiple datasets; incompatible geographic information systems that make it difficult to find, access and reuse spatial data; obstructions to sharing and reusing spatial data such as institutional, financial and legal barriers that prevent or delay the use of existing spatial data. Our experiences reveal that the support of top administrators, management, technical staff and financial personnel, cross-organisational communications, and a well-defined project scope are important for the success of the development and use of a Geo-Portal.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the WP 4 of the EU-Project INTELCITIES. WP 4 has been coordinated by Clemens Deilmann (IOER). The authors would like to thank Ralf Hedel for his contribution in assem- bling the geo-database; Rolf Hermann, Irina Weber, and Christian Hainke (Department of Urban Planning, City of Dresden), Olaf Holthaus (Heidenau), Sabine Güttel and Gudrun Block (Freital), Steffen Möhrs and Frank Becker (Pirna) for their support and contribution during the course of the work. Patrick Horisberger (Fa. GEOTASK Basel) and Björn Dejoks (Fa. SRP Berlin) also made contributions to this work.

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