Semantic Interoperability of German and European Land-Use Information

An operational spatial information infrastructure needs feasible spatial information exchange between different stakeholders. When building spatial information infrastructures at the international level interoperability between the national level and supra-national level data becomes particularly important. The paper presents a study analyzing spatial information interoperability in the field of land-use information. In particular, the case study addresses information exchange between German and European land-use planning information. Spatial Planning in Germany is regulated by the countryspecific Federal Building Code. A spatial application schema XPlanGML was developed to serve as a standard for information exchange of spatial planning documents in the national e-government processes. At the European level the ongoing European INSPIRE initiative seeks to establish a framework to enable interoperable information exchange in many themes, one of which is the theme of land-use. The paper studies interoperability aspects between the recently released German standard as defined in XPlanGML and the current status of corresponding INSPIRE data specifications in detail.