Implementing a Municipal SDI with Service Oriented Architecture

The highly dynamic and complex nature of today’s metropolitans requires that any “service provision” of their municipality be fast, economical, and of high quality. This goal could only be reached through cooperating or interoperating applications. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are indispensable from this respect. Enabling Application-to-Application (A2A) integration, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises the interoperation required by SDIs. Service Oriented Architecture strives to achieve economies of scale in the development and implementation of business solutions via the reuse of services and service components. Geospatial processes, data, applications, and technology can all be more efficiently used and implemented by leveraging SOA principles. However, there are a number of technical issues involved in implementing municipal SDI with SOA in an enterprise organization such as municipality of metropolitans. The aim of this work is to identify these issues and derive a framework out of them which will guide the design, development, and maintenance of a large scale organization SDI. Since there is no such framework in place, implementing a SOA based municipal SDI seems a very ambitious and difficult undertaking. Although there are sparse work on the issue, they either are so general or do not deal with the issues at the desired level of practicality and detail. Given the complexity of the issues involved and the immaturity of the SOA technologies, it is rather difficult to come up with a framework though. However, there are countermeasures and already stable components of available SOA technologies. This paper presents the specification of the service oriented approach which is used for developing the Tehran Municipality SDI. SOA constructed a distributed, dynamic, flexible, and re-configurable service system over Internet that could meet information and service requirements of many different users from inside departments of municipality or from outside by different urban organizations.