Interoperability for GIS Document Management in Environmental Planning

Environmental planning requires constant tracing and revision of activities. Planners must be provided with appropriate documentation tools to aid communication among them and support plan enactment, revision and evolution. Moreover, planners often work in distinct institutions, thus these supporting tools must interoperate in distributed environments and in a semantically coherent fashion. Since semantics are strongly related to use, documentation also enhances the ways in which users can cooperate. The emergence of the Semantic Web created the need for documenting Web data and processes, using specific standards. This paper addresses this problem, for two issues: (1) ways of documenting planning processes, in three different aspects: what was done, how it was done and why it was done that way; and (2) a framework that supports the management of those documents using Semantic Web standards.