SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association
SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association
SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association
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make it hard for citizens and civil servants to oversee the consequences of proposed<br />
solutions.<br />
In this article we will show the Legal Atlas as an eGovernment approach that helps citizens,<br />
businesses and civil servants to cope with a vast number of rules in their day-today<br />
processes. Standardised legal knowledge representations and maps enable stakeholders<br />
to cope with legal pluralism and the complex interaction between European<br />
and national legislation and local regulations. We advocate that the Legal Atlas approach<br />
helps users to access relevant regulations concisely and comprehensively. The<br />
map-based interface providing access to the applicable regulations offers a powerful<br />
means to ensure usability and client satisfaction.<br />
This article explains in section 2 the need for such an approach, and the research setup.<br />
Sections 3 and 4 describe the development of the prototype towards the Legal Atlas<br />
application. This is followed by a section assessing the impact of INSPIRE for local<br />
authorities. Finally, conclusions are provided and further research recommended.<br />
2. CITIZEN’S NEEDS AND LEGAL ATLAS<br />
The Legal Atlas systems should provide the ultimate transparency of local regulations<br />
so that citizens could ask ‘where can I do this?’, instead of ‘can I do this in place such<br />
and such?’ (Wilson and Peters, 2004). Such an application requires a unique coding for<br />
all local and regional legal functionalities affecting citizens and a mechanism for semantically<br />
mapping (Boer et al., 2002) between the legal terms and legal procedures<br />
affecting those required functionalities. In that way the citizen could view and monitor<br />
the consequences of decisions and opposition. The Legal Atlas uses the IMRO<br />
XML/GML coding scheme (the legally binding Dutch information model for spatial planning)<br />
to enable the user to query the underlying legal system using detailed coloured<br />
maps representing legal constraints and possibilities (supporting explanation and understanding<br />
by users).<br />
Our research followed an iterative design approach resulting in Legal Atlas prototypes<br />
I, II and III. For Legal Atlas I (see Figure 1), we conducted empirical studies (Peters<br />
and Van Engers, 2004) in decision making-processes reflecting their complexity including<br />
the stakeholders involved in such processes. Users from government and businesses<br />
tested a number of prototypes, screen mock-ups and real life systems. Most<br />
testing groups were between 10 and 20 individuals. Different forms of performance<br />
measuring provided the necessary feedback on the adequacy of our solution, and different<br />
interviewing techniques were applied to obtain thorough feedback of the users.<br />
This resulted in Legal Atlas I which contained navigation techniques that helped to<br />
navigate through four levels of laws and regulations: European, national, regional and<br />
municipal. Early results from using and demonstrating the system in the Netherlands<br />
(Wilson and Peters, 2004) showed high user satisfaction and gave confidence that this<br />
type of solution would be feasible in other European countries.<br />
3. LEGAL ATLAS II<br />
A second version of the Legal Atlas builds on the experiences from Legal Atlas I. In<br />
Legal Atlas II, we wanted to extend the retrieval possibilities of law from text to map. By<br />
clicking on a regulation the user would be able to identify all objects or map areas<br />
where this regulation applies through a visualisation mechanism. While this may seem<br />
a small extension of the first version, the reader should realise that there is a big difference<br />
between the question: “what will be allowed here?” and “where will this be al-<br />
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