Enterprise Gis for Municipalities – a Service Oriented Approach

Eٍnterprise Geographical Information Systems (EGISs) provide municipal governments with extraordinary quantitative and qualitative benefits. A municipal EGIS consists of technology, personnel, and other resources to create, maintain, visualize, search, and share geospatial data and services. At a minimum, the municipal EGIS provides these capabilities to all departments of the municipality. Usually the municipal EGIS extends many of these capabilities to the general public, external private entities, and external public agencies as well. EGIS is a fundamental element of e-government because it adds the critical elements of location and visualization to interaction between the municipal departments and the public. Often knowing where a government action or other event in the community is occurring, as well as what is nearby, is essential for achieving informed public participation and timely delivery of services. However, in traditional situation of municipalities, it is not possible for individual standalone services to meet all the service requirements of many users. Such service requests could be met by dynamically chaining multiple services provided by single and multiple service providers. In this paper we propose a Service Oriented Approach for developing an EGIS for Municipalities. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) recognizes this and tries to construct a distributed, dynamic, flexible, and re-configurable service system over Internet that can meet information and service requirements of many different users.