SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

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