INSPIRED eGovernment Apps
– Love All, Serve All
J. Robbrecht1, C. Elfers2
1Agentschap voor Geografische Informatie Vlaanderen (AGIV), Ghent, Belgium
2con terra GmbH, Münster, Germany
eGovernment services need to bring value to citizens. Their purpose is to help through various aspects of citizens lifecycle. This is also true for geospatially enabled eGovernment services that use INSPIRE and SDI resources in order to provide this value.
The INSPIRE infrastructure in particular is focusing on the technical plumbing and the legal regulations to provide data. These are required prerequisites, but as such they are not enough to bring value to citizens. It is required to bridge people and their problems/tasks with the INSPIRE infrastructure to realize the benefits of it. It are the solution applications that are needed to cover this last mile between users and infrastructure. To make it more complicated, citizens are no SDI experts, nor experts in the field of spatial data. Therefore, it is hard, even impossible, to reach both citizens and experts via common geoportals or artificial multi-purpose geo-viewers.
When dealing with the public, new concepts need to be elaborated. The solutions apps need to be easy to use and they need to be efficient. They need to be very focused on the problem/solution fit. They need to inform and they also need to entertain. This presentation will provide rapid ideas, thoughts and possibilities that can be used to build efficient, problem-solving and entertaining solutions apps.
With its new geoportal ( www.geopunt.be ), of which the first release is expected in November 2013, the Flemish government aims to cater for the general public using user friendly solution apps. By combining location based and layer based information in an intuitive user interface, the user benefits of aggregating a variety of data sources to answer everyday life questions: Is there a childcare facility or school close to work or home? Is this area prone to flooding? Are there roadworks going on or planned on my way to work? More advanced geo-users will be served with an advanced mode that allows them to do basic data analysis on the rich set of data published by the SDI-Flanders community. Apps and services used in the geoportal will provide public interfaces, to be used by service providers to integrate in their applications or process workflows.