Spatial Planning – the Open Field for Data Description and Web Services

Spatial planning is important not only from the view of development of settlements and urbanised territories. It is necessary to integrate spatial planning activities in the total process of sustainable growth and landscape management. Spatial planning data represents an example of a part of SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure). The current world and public need to share, combine, search, distribute and publish spatial data connected with spatial planning. Such data plays an important role in every time. This paper describes the current results of four large European projects related to spatial planning – Humboldt, BRISEIDE (BRIdging SErvices, Information and Data for Europe), Plan4all (European Network of Best Practices for Interoperability of Spatial Planning Information) and SDI-EDU (SDI-EDU for Regional and Urban Planning). These projects are focused on the design of models of spatial data suitable for spatial planning, the transformation and mapping of models, application of web services, education and training of above-mentioned activities. The projects are centred around and compliant with INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) and the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI). This paper shows a summary of actual knowledge gained from these projects including relation of different types of spatial data description, spatial data harmonization and application of web services. Also the interconnections between these projects are mentioned.