SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

cause changes in Dutch and regional legislation. Therefore, INSPIRE may well be one
of the directives with the highest impact on local and provincial authorities.
9. CONCLUSIONS
This article described three prototypes that have been iteratively built and have resulted
in the current Legal Atlas approach. Legal Atlas seems to offer the required supporting
environment fulfilling a clear need of those public authorities that govern complex
issues that require a participative policy- and decision-making strategy aimed at
conflict resolution rather than polarisation.
The participative and iterative building approach of Legal Atlas has resulted in a series
of working prototypes that could be tested in settings that are similar to the problem
areas involving the stakeholders working on those problems. This practice-oriented design
and development approach resulted in a useful solution; something that probably
would have been much harder if we would have limited ourselves to traditional requirements
oriented design methods. The participative design method we have chosen
made it possible to better understand user needs and helped us to develop a effective
Legal Map oriented solution.
We have highlighted problems based on INSPIRE impact research among Dutch provinces.
The most important problem concerns the harmonisation of calculation methods
of indicators. We showed that we succeeded to build a tool that now becomes part of
the core business of the province of Flevoland. It enables further query articulation and
precision for citizens and businesses that seek negotiation space, opportunities and
problems while the political decision process is underway.
This article described an interaction approach similar to the one used in the well-known
Simcity game. This allows users to detect easily the negotiation space in conflicts of
interests in complex policy- and decision-making processes.
Despite the fact that our research already shows a solution for handling the complexity
caused by legal pluralism, one could argue that this approach is limited to much ruleoriented
spatial planning problems that are typical for small countries like the Netherlands.
We argue that the need for weighing and balancing various interests in densely
populated regions such as the Netherlands may be higher than in less populated regions,
but this weighing and balancing is essential for and core to the rule of law and
our approach may very well be beneficial to other countries.
It should be stressed that although most of our tests have been conducted in the domain
of spatial planning our approach can also be applied to other legal domains. All
laws have a jurisdiction and are consequently location bound. While a legislative maps
approach has advantages in the domain of spatial planning it is not limited to that domain.
Spatial planning is an area where many different interests have to be weighed
and balanced, like many other areas. It for the same reasons neither is typically suited
for dense regions or countries like the Netherlands. Every regulation has location related
elements if only jurisdiction and many problems that require legal reasoning require
a smart combination of legal sources, constraint satisfaction and conflict resolution.
It is also true that not just spatial regulations require other that text based representations
and combining non-textual representation with textual legal sources can be
realized using exactly the technology demonstrated here.
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