Reasoning with spatial plans on the semantic web

Abstract

There are several reasons why citizens, businesses and civil servants need access to regulations. Unfortunately, traditional approaches that aim to provide this access fall short, especially in the area of spatial planning. Fairly straightforward questions such as \where will I be able to perform this kind of activity" or \is this activity allowed here" are not answered automatically by current systems. There are many attempts to create one-stop-shop front-ends to eGovernment, but these are seldom built from the perspective of the user. This paper describes our work on what we call a Legal Atlas'. Using various Semantic Web technologies we combine distributed geospatial data, textual data and controlled vocabularies in order to support users in answering questions such as those mentioned above. Copyright 2009 ACM.