Information systems for urban planning - a hypermedia co-operative approach

Robert Laurini is one of the most respected names in computing and urban planning. He has authored over 150 refereed papers on computing and GIS. Laurini is currently head of the Laboratory for Information System Engineering (LISI), a research center associated with At the time of this writing, December 2002, he is vice-president of UDMS (Urban Data Management Society), the European association whose goal is the promotion of urban information systems. Clearly, Laurini's work is a unique blend of research and applied science. Laurini's 1992 book, Fundamentals of Spatial Information Systems, written with Derek Thompson, was one of the best introductions to the field. This new book moves well beyond that base, providing a comprehensive guide to the implementation of information systems to support urban planning. Laurini draws on the bits and pieces scattered throughout the literature , extracting the best of more than 200 publications and providing references that will help the reader interested in more detail. In addition, he references dozens of websites that serve as additional resources and examples. (As might be expected, some of the sites have moved or gone out of existence since the book was published in February 2001.) Information Systems for Urban Planning pulls these many resources together in a single resource. This is the only book of its kind and it is well worth the investment. The reader should pay special attention to the book's subtitle, A Hypermedia Cooperative Approach. By far the biggest issue facing urban planning, from Laurini's perspective, is the need to link various databases in order to provide a sound information base and connect people to data in a seamless way. This focus is spelled out in chapter 1 on systems analysis of the urban planning process. Bringing data together is a major challenge and a major focus of the book. Chapter 2 discusses methodologies for designing information systems that will work togetheröthe goal of any enterprise system. Chapters 3 and 11 discuss means of supplying data to those systems. Chapter 3 deals with more traditional approaches and chapter 11 focuses on real-time information systems for urban environments and risks monitoring. Chapter 4 addresses the issue of quality control and multisource updating of urban databases. Chapter 6 focuses on metadata and related ways of describing data that make it useful outside its home environment. Chapter 10 discusses the various computer architectures that can support urban planning databases, along …