SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

Figure 1: Result set showing protected coastal area with socio economic map layers
and geocoded Legal document retrieval on terms like “alcohol”.
lowed?” The second inverse question demands a complete semantic definition of the
world and complete legal coverage of that world (Boer et al., 2007).
The prototype of the second version demonstrating this functionality is shown in Figure
2. The darkened contour in the picture is selected by searching for ‘housing’ in the legal
texts that apply to the area. The application seeks for ‘housing’ among all legal texts
and returns hits with those regulations that apply to ‘housing’. When the regulation is
selected it returns all relevant map contours where this regulation applies.
With additional legal reasoning (Deontic) arithmetic, such a functionality enables questions
like: return all contours on the map where regulation ‘X’ and ‘Y’ apply with exception
of rule ‘Z’ (Boer et al., 2003).
The codes are now translated to GML syntax rules, which helps to create a more flexible
and maintainable codification system. Legal Atlas I already had demonstrated the
usefulness of Geographic-Legal Information systems, but the legal sources were selected
manually. Legal Atlas II was based on an open and extensible architecture using
semantic web technologies (Winkels et al., 2007).
4. USER CONSULTATION AND EVALUATION OF LEGAL ATLAS II
To create and test the Legal Atlas II system we included consultation and user evaluation
activities in our development project. From March to May 2008, 12 in-depth interviews
were conducted with building experts, development experts, environmental specialists
and government officials. The purpose of the prototype was to engage the interviewees
in a design dialogue before building a real life system. The second struc-
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