SOA based web solution for Integrated Urban Planning and Management System

Dr Sukanta Kumar Jena
Project Manager
Infotech,
Email: sukantj@indiatimes.com





Incessant increasing urbanization over the past few decades has generated the key urban concern of the growing gap between demand and supply of basic services. There has been a steady growth in the housing stock, infrastructure and services, but due to the growing concentration of urban population in larger towns the gaps between demand and supply have been rising. The required massive upgrade and renovation of civic amenity assets, is constrained by high population density and concentrated commercial activities. This backlog in development can be mitigated by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based web GIS solution for an Integrated Urban Planning & Management System (IUPMS), which this paper seeks to address.

IUPMS will provide a common framework for collaborating all the departments of the urban administration to collect data, share information and to conduct inter & intra departmental analysis in order to become more efficient. This proposed solution will integrate through a SOA, the various urban administrative agencies to seamlessly share information and access to output of the systems of other departments. IUPMS integrated in the city website provides extensive information to all stakeholders including administration departments, external agencies and citizens.

The elegance in this solution lies in its ability to leverage the already existing IT infrastructure in the various administrative departments by providing a common platform for the public and other associated public service departments through which to gain a single point of access to the entire range of available information based on a hierarchy of users and appropriate restrictions on data. This solution is expected to satisfy both the citizen’s requirement for ease of information access & speeding up of procedure while simultaneously safeguarding the interests of the urban bodies keeping confidential information secure but still facilitating close interaction between all concerned parties. We recognize & acknowledge the difficulties in implementing such a comprehensive solution, however the benefits that should accrue through the implementation and appropriate use of this system will outweigh these challenges.