A service-oriented architecture to enable participatory ...

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A service-oriented architecture to enable participatory planning: an eplanning platform a

M. Ebrahim Poorazizi , Stefan Steiniger

ab

a

& Andrew J.S. Hunter

a

Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada b

Departamento de Ingeniería de Transporte y Logística, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile Published online: 17 Mar 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: M. Ebrahim Poorazizi, Stefan Steiniger & Andrew J.S. Hunter (2015): A serviceoriented architecture to enable participatory planning: an e-planning platform, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2015.1008492 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2015.1008492

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International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2015.1008492

A service-oriented architecture to enable participatory planning: an e-planning platform M. Ebrahim Poorazizia*, Stefan Steinigera,b and Andrew J.S. Huntera a Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada; Departamento de Ingeniería de Transporte y Logística, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

b


(Received 10 December 2013; final version received 12 January 2015) Recent advances in Web technologies have opened avenues to create socio-technical platforms that can empower citizens in urban planning processes. The rise of the GeoWeb and the popularity of Web 2.0 collaborative tools can facilitate the development of a new generation of bottom-up Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms that can incorporate user-generated content into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). New service-based delivery mechanisms can provide architectural flexibility and adaptability, and enable the public to benefit from ubiquitous information access. From an e-participation perspective, Web 2.0 social networking functions support interactive communication among various PPGIS stakeholders, e.g., citizens, planners, and decision makers. The main contribution of this article is to present a reference architecture for e-planning platforms that (1) facilitates effective e-participation by allowing multidirectional map-based communication among various land development stakeholders (e.g., planners, decision makers, citizens, etc.), and (2) enables incorporation of visualization, evaluation, and discussion capabilities to support community planning processes. To achieve this, we developed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits SDI principles and Web 2.0 technologies. The platform architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functionality and tools, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to provide a planning and decision support platform. We present two real-world implementations of the proposed architecture that have been developed to support community engagement in the City of Calgary, Canada. Keywords: e-participation; PPGIS; urban planning; SOA; SDI; Web 2.0

Introduction Web 2.0 technologies provide a World Wide Web ecosystem for participation where value is created through individual user contributions (Gruber 2008). These technologies show promise for Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) implementations, particularly when developing SDIs1 that encourage local mapping activities (Haklay et al. 2008), and the creation of volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007). With these technologies, SDI development can move towards a ‘produser’, i.e., producer and user-driven paradigm that serves the wider needs of society in a more transparent manner (Budhathoki et al. 2008). Such SDIs enable the formation of networks of people that ‘produse’ upto-date information (Budhathoki et al. 2008). This user-contributed information has the capacity to improve the quality of urban data, as noted in Coleman et al. (2009). *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] © 2015 Taylor & Francis


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M.E. Poorazizi et al.

Furthermore, in keeping with the Aarhus Convention,2 sustainability can be only achieved by including citizens in spatial decision-making, and by accessing local tacit knowledge (Collins 2001) through the wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki 2004). To aid the participatory role demanded of city planners, Arnstein (1969), Kakabadse et al. (2003), and organizations such as the International Association for Public Participation (No Date), among others, have developed ladders of participation. These ladders define various levels of communication within a spectrum of participation. The lowest level is generally the responsibility to inform citizens about solutions to (planning) problems, providing ideally, different alternatives, while keeping information balanced and objective. This is typically a one-way communication process implemented by many government jurisdictions in the form of traditional planning meetings. It includes informing citizenry of planning projects using maps, development proposals, and educational material. The basic need for such information in an online form has been expressed repeatedly in the planning literature (see Talen 2000, Drummond and French 2008, Tait 2012, Donders et al. 2014). However, Talen (2000), Drummond and French (2008), and Kahane et al. (2013), among others, note also that it is beneficial for information to flow ‘between’ citizenry, stakeholders, and decision-makers – not just from planners to others. Accordingly, higher levels of participation and deliberation include aspects of consultation, involvement, and collaboration, using a two-way communication processes. The possibility of deliberating on (1) neighbourhood issues and (2) planning projects using different media (email, forums, chat rooms, etc.) has rarely been accomplished (Mandarano et al. 2010). However, in the scope of Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS), prototype online applications incorporating information and communication functionality have been developed, e.g., GeoDF (Zhao and Coleman 2006) and ArgooMap (Rinner et al. 2008). PPGIS has arisen through the coalescing of GIS and participatory action research. Participatory action research is a research methodology designed to engage all stakeholders to examine together a situation, which they experience as problematic, in order to change and improve it. This process is undertaken through critical reflection of the historical, political, and cultural contexts within which the problem occurs (Greenwood et al. 1993). As such, PPGIS strives to enhance local capacity to generate and use information for self-determination (e.g., protection of ancestral lands, resource rights, and entitlements), for good governance through transparent deliberative decision-making, and, to raise awareness through education. To collaborate through a participatory process requires decision makers and stakeholders to engage citizens. Research has shown that augmentation of face-to-face deliberation with gaming technologies enhance participants’ understanding of the challenges involved in the planning process (Gordon and Manosevitch 2011). In another vein, insights from cognitive psychology have provided the basis for using visual cues, e.g., maps, to promote more deliberative contributions in online forums (Manosevitch et al. 2014). Besides online discussions, these methods also include opportunities to rank planning options, assign weights to plan evaluation criteria, and voting tools, so that citizens can express their preferences from a set of planning scenarios. Voting, as an option for citizen participation, is barely discussed in the planning literature reviewed, but is considered in the literature on multi-criteria decision-analysis (Hwang and Lin 1986). Guhathakurta (1999) also mentions voting functions in his analysis of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) for planning, and Talen (2000) speaks in general of the desirability for citizens to be able to express what they like, or dislike, as part of a community profiling and knowledge acquisition process.


International Journal of Geographical Information Science

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From a governance perspective, e-participation is able to involve citizens early in the planning process (Donders et al. 2014). Expertise can be mobilized easily via the Internet so that knowledge, ideas, and experiences of citizens can be used. The anonymity of the Internet can also lessen the burden of engagement in a planning process and all engagement is documented and can be returned readily (Mandarano et al. 2010). Mergel (2013) reports that government organizations have observed citizen adoption of social media and are attempting to connect with those who have moved to social media to receive information and news. Hence, it seems that governments want to connect with citizens on all potential communication channels. In some instances, governments are actively encouraging citizens to co-create and share information – see for instance applications developed by Shareabouts.org or FixMyStreet.org. But as Bertot et al. (2012) point out, it is unclear to what extent the information that flows into government is finally used, or acted upon. As such, to support effective citizen participation in community planning, there is a need to develop a collaborative geospatial infrastructure to collect, process, visualize, and interpret spatial and non-spatial planning information and ideas within a frame that fits into existing policy and decision-making processes. The infrastructure should enable participation by citizens, and facilitate communication with planners and decision makers to deliver sustainable planning processes. We present a technical architecture designed to facilitate e-participation in urban planning using a service-oriented information system. The proposed architecture has been implemented for use in Calgary, Alberta, Canada (http://www.planyourplace.ca), to help citizens engage in local community-planning activities. We have adopted the position that access to the infrastructure should be platform-independent, ubiquitous, flexible, and open, which should be guaranteed by developing a solution that adopts SDI best practices (Lee and Percivall 2008). Geospatial resources, i.e., geospatial data and services, are considered to be problematic and tend to impede interoperability, because there are a variety of existing data models, data formats, data semantics, and possible spatial relationships that should be considered (Vescoukis et al. 2012). For this reason, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has introduced several service interfaces and data encoding standards for implementing geospatial services3 in SDIs. Using these OGC’s standard specifications, a geospatial Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be created to support discovery, access, processing, and visualization of distributed geospatial resources. Wu et al. (2010), Díaz et al. (2011), and Vescoukis et al. (2012) used SOA to implement an interactive platform for publicizing urban planning processes, to manage user-generated content in a geospatial cyberinfrastructure, and to design and develop decision support systems for crisis management. The utilization of SOA for online PPGIS applications is useful for three reasons. First, using a ‘Data as a Service’ approach provides an interoperable solution to access heterogeneous, distributed data, and allows faster access if a large number of users demand data at the same time. Second, participatory planning tools should provide evaluation functions for various assessment models to measure impacts of a development plan. These models should be plugged-in to the platform as external resources. Designing an architecture that enables evaluation functions to be treated as services based on the ‘Software as a Service’ approach will provide a standard solution to integrate evaluation functions into the platform. Finally, an SOA-based development approach enables production of

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systems that can be flexibly adapted to changing requirements and technologies (Sahin and Gumusay 2008). In the following, we review previous works in the field of web-based PPGIS with a focus on technical issues. We outline the system design principles used, and present the service-based system architecture for e-planning, including a description of key components and modules. Finally, we discuss two implementations that utilize the service architecture and summarize our findings.


Previous works in PPGIS: a technical perspective PPGIS implementation methodologies have evolved over the past decade from traditional public meetings and paper-based mapping, to online discussion forums and Internet-based surveys (see Craig et al. 2002, Elwood 2006, 2008, Sieber 2006, Bugs 2012). Pocewicz et al. (2012) suggest that traditional PPGIS methods may result in a greater participation, but explains this, partially, due to the fact that participants appear to have more difficulty assimilating knowledge necessary to actively engage in web-based PPGIS activities (Pocewicz et al. 2012). Hence, there is (still) a need for developing better e-planning tools that can provide new ways to facilitate broader public participation (Krek 2005). In the late 1990s, computer-based tools such as computer-aided design (CAD), desktop GIS, and decision support software were used in urban planning processes to support public participation (Craig and Elwood 1998, Talen 1999, Meng and Malczewski 2009). However, these tools could only readily be used by experts (e.g., planners) as they: (1) were expensive to deploy, (2) required specific technical knowledge, (3) lacked userfriendliness and interactivity, and (4) had limited ability to reflect users’ opinions (Meng and Malczewski 2009) – all of which impede engagement. With the development of webbased PPGIS, urban-planning engagement processes have improved and become more interactive (Wu et al. 2010). Web 2.0 has moved the Internet towards a more collaborative and participatory environment, in which people not only consume content, but also produce new content (Bugs et al. 2010). This is what Coleman et al. (2009) called the ‘produsers’ of information. The OpenStreetMap project is one of the most signiﬁcant examples of a collection of geographical information based on user-generated content (Girres and Touya 2010), and is enabled by ‘technologies of collaboration’ as discussed by Haklay et al. (2008). We believe that implementation of PPGIS within a socio-technical4 perspective, enabled by Web 2.0-driven social networking tools and web mapping services, can achieve higher levels of e-participation. But this assumes effective utilization of Web 2.0 multidirectional communication tools, and the creation of user-friendly and accessible assessment and evaluation tools for planning (Steiniger et al. 2012, Kahane et al. 2013). Several research works have shown already that this is possible: see Bugs et al. (2010), Hall et al. (2010), Bugs (2012), and Butt and Li (2012). Tables 1 and 2 list and describe prominent PPGIS platforms from a technical perspective. They are not exhaustive reviews; rather the intent is to give an overview of existing work. We can group the previous works into three generations. The first covers systems that were built using a client-server architecture and implemented as Java Applets. Example platforms listed in Table 1 include: (1-i) Virtual Slaithwaite by Kingston et al. (2000), (1-ii) Common GIS by Voss et al. (2004), and (1-iii) ArguMap by Keßler et al. (2005; for a list of software applications and libraries mentioned in this article see Appendix A).

None

Unknown JRE

None

Coarse-grain

LA

None

None

Open source JRE

None

Coarse-grain

A

None

Deployment cost (initial cost of setup)

License Runtime dependencies Standardscompatibility and Interoperability (W3C – OGC) Granularity and reusability2

None

SLA

Coarse-grain

None

Unknown JRE

None

Unknown

SLA

Coarse-grain

None

Unknown None

Dependent on ArcIMS

MySQL

ArcIMS, phpBB

Client-server ArcIMS Viewer

GeoDF

2-i

User authentication

None

LA

Coarse-grain

None

Open source None

None

MySQL

PHP

Client-server Google Maps

ArgooMap

2-ii

Multi-level user access permission

None

SLA

Coarse-grain

None

Open source None

PostgreSQL/ PostGIS None

.NET Framework, GeoServer

Client-server OpenLayers, GeoExt

GeoDeliberator

2-iii

User authentication

Data transformation

LA

Coarse-grain

None

Open source None

None

MySQL

PHP


Canela

2-iv

Generation 2

User authentication

None

LA

Coarse-grain

None

Open source None


PHP, MapSever (MapScript)

Client-server Chameleon

MapChat

2-v

None

LA

Medium-grain (web services)

W3C: SOAP OGC data formats

SQL Server, ArcSDE Built on commercial products (ESRI and Microsoft) Unknown None

ArcGIS Server, . NET framework

Client-server Web ADF for ArcGIS Server

Margov

2-vii

User User authentication authentication

None

SLAS

Coarse-grain

None

Unknown Flash Player


PHP, Java, Flex


WOLPgis

2-vi

Data transformation

Medium-grain (cloud services) SLATES

None

Open source None

None

Cloud Storage

Cloud Services

Cloud Google Maps

ArgooMap-GAE

3-ii

User User authentication authentication

Sunlight analysis

Medium-grain (web services) SALE

Unknown GeoGlobe application W3C: SOAP OGC: CityGML

Unknown

Unknown

Web Services

SOA GeoGlobe

3D PPGIS

3-i

Generation 3

Notes: 1Unknown means that it is evident that the systems are using a database, but project documentation does not identify which database. 2 This criterion refers to the level of granularity of server-side components (see Creating Services: Granularity and Wrapping Resources). We assumed three levels of granularity to compare the PPGIS platforms: (1) coarse-grain, which refers to a black-box system exposed as a single component, (2) medium-grain, which refers to a web service-based system exposed as a single service, and (3) fine-grain, which refers to a SOA exposed as a chain of services. Generally, when a system is designed with a fine level of granularity, reusability of its components (i.e., services) in other scenarios will be increased. 3 Social networking functions include: (1) searching: content discovery, (2) linking: content interconnector, (3) authoring: content publishing, (4) tagging: content categorization, (5) extension: additional data and functionality integrator, and (6) signalling: notification function. (see McAfee (2006) and Sani and Rinner (2011) for a detail discussion.)

Social networking functionality3 Real-time evaluation (web-based processing) Security implementation

None

Unknown

Unknown

Servlet

Client-server Java Applet, GeoTools

ArguMap

1-iii

Finding areas of hottest discussion User User User authentication authentication authentication

GeoTools, Servlet

System architecture Client-side component (web mapping API) Server-side component (spatial application server) Database1

Perl

CommonGIS

Virtual Slaithwaite


1-ii

1-i

Generation 1

A comparison of existing web‐based PPGIS platforms that are research prototypes.


Table 1.


6 Table 2.

M.E. Poorazizi et al. A comparison of selected community-driven, citizen-centric platforms.

System architecture


Client-side component (web mapping API) Server-side component (spatial application server) Database1 Deployment cost (initial cost of setup) License Runtime dependencies Standards-compatibility and Interoperability (W3C – OGC) Granularity and reusability2 Social networking functionality3 Real-time evaluation (web-based processing) Security implementation

FixMyStreet

OpenPlans

CodeForAmerica

Client-server

Client-server

Client-server

OpenLayers

Leaflet JS

Perl

Django web framework

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL/ PostGIS

None

None

Open source None None

Open source None W3C: REST

PostgreSQL/ PostGIS, MongoDB, SQLite Includes ‘free’ and ‘paid’ apps Open source, commercial None W3C: REST

Coarse-grain SLAES

Medium-grain (web services) SLAES

Medium-grain (web services) SLAES

None

None

None

User authentication User authentication

MapBox JS HTML5 Ruby on Rails Node.js

User authentication

Note: See note in Table 1.

The second generation is composed of systems designed using a client-server architecture and developed using modern web mapping APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Examples that we are aware of are: (2-i) GeoDF by Tang (2006), and (2-ii) ArgooMap by Rinner et al. (2008), which was a redesigned version of ArguMap, with the addition of decision support system functionality. Further second-generation examples include: (2-iii) the GeoDeliberator by Cai and Yu (2009), (2-iv) the Canela Platform by Bugs et al. (2010), (2-v) MapChat by Hall et al. (2010), (2-vi) WOLPgis by Butt and Li (2012), and (2-vii) Margov by Painho et al. (2013). The third-generation systems adopt SOA or cloud computing in their design and implementation. Examples include (3-i) 3D PPGIS by Wu et al. (2010), a virtual globebased application, and (3-ii) ArgooMap-GAE by Sani and Rinner (2011), a further extension of ArgooMap based on the Google App Engine. In addition to the academic research projects above, there are some online citizencentric initiatives designed to improve local public services, collect feedback from communities, and facilitate the engagement of citizens in community planning. Examples include FixMyStreet.com, CodeForAmerica.org, and OpenPlans.org, which enable citizens to view, report, and discuss local problems (e.g., graffiti, street lighting, or safety of sidewalks), to propose planning alternatives (e.g., parking strategies for their block or location of a bike-sharing dock in their community), and to track resolutions made by local governments. These initiatives aim to engage the public in decision-making processes, and to promote e-government – technology-enabled public services and citizen engagement (King and Brown 2007, Dunleavy 2010). Particular examples by



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CodeForAmerica developers include CityVoice, Textizen, and StreetMix, as well as Shareabouts.org by OpenPlans. Table 2 lists technical features of these systems. From a system architecture perspective, most of the online PPGIS platforms were developed using a client-server architecture, except for 3D PPGIS, Margov, and ArgooMap-GAE, which use a service-oriented or cloud computing architecture. The client-side modules were mainly designed and implemented using HTML and JavaScript, except for Virtual Slaithwaite, CommonGIS, ArguMap, and 3D PPGIS. Server-side components, including application server and database, were developed using programming languages such as PHP, Java, and the .NET framework. From an interoperability perspective, some of the platforms, e.g., ArguMap and WOLPgis, impose software dependencies as they were developed using Java Applet and Adobe Flex that must be installed on the client browser. Excepting GeoDF and Margov, all platforms were developed using open-source software technologies and, hence, present cost-effective solutions. The online citizen-centric platforms are mostly developed using simple clientserver architectures, using modern tools and web frameworks. Therefore, they can be easily customized, developed, and deployed. In terms of system security, besides GeoDeliberator, all PPGIS platforms used single-level user authentication methods that cannot address data copyright and privacy issues, which may be of concern to PPGIS communities. A further issue is the lack of interoperability. This is common to all listed PPGIS platforms. Utilizing non-interoperable components and non-standardized systems hinders accessibility to information, which is typically a central requirement of PPGIS (Zhao and Coleman 2006). In addition, non-interoperability affects reusability of components of a system. Most of the online PPGIS platforms mentioned were designed and developed as coarse-grain systems, which means that their modules and components cannot be reused in other applications, nor can they be easily replaced. From an e-participation stand point, current web-based platforms do provide information and discussion tools. The integration of both improves the utility of PPGIS applications dramatically (Sani and Rinner 2011), but what is still missing is a full implementation of information, communication, and action tools within PPGIS. Following the International Association for Public Participation (No Date), the ultimate level of e-participation enables the public to take responsibility for final decision-making. This level of planning participation can be achieved by developing analysis tools for the evaluation of planning alternatives (Peng 2001, Drummond and French 2008). In this context, none of the systems reviewed support web-based (geo)processing functionality, except for some simple analysis tools for data transformation, which themselves were not OGC/ISO standard compliant. Consequently, our work aims to address the limitations of previously developed webbased PPGIS applications with respect to: (1) integration of communication and deliberation mechanisms that fit within existing policy and decision-making processes transparently; (2) citizen access to Planning Support Systems (Batty 1995) or Spatial Decision Support Systems (Clarke 1990) – so that they can run ‘what if’ scenarios; (3) extension of two-way communication mechanisms to raise awareness, aid education, and build citizen capacity, that supports self-determination, and (4) a flexible system architecture that supports interoperability and extensibility through standard compliance and modularization. The design principles used to develop the components of the proposed architecture are discussed in the following sections.

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Design principles for a participatory planning architecture The proposed architecture is based on service-oriented principles, produser-driven SDI guidelines, and PPGIS principles. In addition to the functional goals described above, we have also identified as set of quality attributes/requirements and business goals (Barbacci et al. 2003, Kazman and Bass 2005), and prioritized them according to their importance for e-planning (see Appendix B). These requirements have been used to: (1) evaluate the consequences of architectural decisions, and (2) find and address system architecture limitations/risks in the software development cycle (Kazman et al. 2012). First priority was given to quality attributes such as scalability/extensibility, open systems/standards, and interoperability, to ensure that systems built using this framework will work together efficiently and result in a set of services that are coherent and address legitimate planning issues and processes. The secondary priorities were performance, flexibility, integrability, security, ease-of-installation, ease-of-use, and functionality. These criteria focus on system capability and quality. Lower level priorities such as distributed development and ease-of-repair are also considered during architecture design, along with a number of quality metrics that should ideally be satisfied to achieve all business goals and, therefore, facilitate the realization of a sustainable e-planning platform. The design principles, discussed next, are grouped into four principal categories: tool requirements; service granularity; integration and reusability; and interoperability.

Tool requirements One of the main goals of the open architecture proposed in this paper is to provide a collaborative environment that enables users to visualize, manipulate, and discuss community-planning projects over the Internet. At a minimum, the environment should incorporate: (1) 2D and 3D geovisualization capability, (2) Web 2.0 collaboration tools, and (3) interactive sketch tools. The success of the social Web, and especially social networking websites like Facebook, highlights users’ interest in establishing relationships with others and sharing information more intensively and efficiently (McAfee 2006, Godin 2008, De Longueville 2010, Manosevitch et al. 2014). Hence, the use of such social media technologies will provide a platform to share information, campaign and communicate with each other on issues that are important to citizens (Yang 2009). For participants, the tools should allow them to contribute to community planning processes through the creation of tags, by rating proposals, adding comments and ideas, and by creating, modifying, or publishing new planning proposals. This feeds back to planners and decision makers a potentially rich source of information about what the desires of a local community might be, and where gaps might exist in local knowledge related to planning and development (De Longueville 2010, Sani and Rinner 2011). The provision of sketch tools enables users to create markups and annotate existing development plans, create and publish their own models as alternative plans, and modify proposed plans. This is important for promoting engagement of community members in local planning issues by ‘handing over the stick’ (Chambers 2007). Web 2.0 technologies such as HTML5 and modern JavaScript libraries such as WebGL or sketch.js can be used to enable such interaction. Based on these tool requirements, we choose a social networkbased approach for the underlying software architecture and integrated map visualization and sketching functionality.


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Creating services: granularity and wrapping resources In addition to allowing users to create, modify, and visualize proposed planning models, citizens need access to analytical services that help them evaluate proposals in terms of fiscal, environmental, and social impacts using various assessment models. SOA-based PPGIS has the potential to fill this need. Therefore, a service design strategy based on specific application requirements is important. Ideally, when designing services, finding the right granularity is important for balancing between multiple criteria such as flexibility, reusability, and performance (Haesen et al. 2008). Service granularity refers to the scope of a web service in terms of the functionality that is exposed (Granell et al. 2010a). Fine-grained services provide elementary, non-decomposable operations exposed as single-service instances. They are services that generally handle simple forms of data exchange. Therefore, they can be reused in other workflows, or integrated with other service instances to meet new application requirements. In coarse-grained services, a group of operations are wrapped into a single-service instance. Although the number of service requests to perform a specific task is reduced, it might be more complicated to integrate them with other services, or modify them to meet new application requirements (Granell et al. 2010a). A coarse-grained service should provide better performance, which has a direct impact on end users, and has become a best practice for designing business services (Kim et al. 2005, Papazoglou and Van Den Heuvel 2006). Conversely, fine-grained services offer flexibility, and increase service reusability, which are key success factors when designing services in SOA (Kirda 2001). Therefore, a good practice is to consider the spectrum of granularity levels to find the right balance between service reusability and performance for various-use cases (Granell et al. 2010a). A service design strategy can follow a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach, or utilize both strategies. Given a topdown perspective, services and models decompose into smaller subsystems that enable the identification of relevant (geo)processes. The decomposition process is terminated when all application requirements are met. Alternatively, a bottom-up approach focuses on wrapping different software modules or scientific algorithms within a service (Li et al. 2010). The composition process is continuous and iterative, and stops when application requirements are met. The two design approaches are generally used in parallel to develop models and scenarios that are reusable and efficient (Stojanovic et al. 2004). Consequently, we have adopted this mixed approach in the development of the service framework reported.

Connecting services: integration and reusability OGCs OpenGIS Service Architecture (2002), from which ISO 19119 (2005) was derived, proposed several design patterns for executing the workflow of services. Alameh (2003) discussed design patterns in detail and proposed three service-chaining architectures: the first is called a ‘transparent’ pattern, or user-defined service chaining. This requires full user interaction to: (1) find all required services, (2) create the service chain, and (3) manage service execution. Second is the ‘translucent’ pattern, or workflow-managed chaining, which requires that the client is aware of the distinct processes and can manage workflow tasks through invocation of a mediated module (e.g., a gateway). Finally, the ‘opaque’ pattern describes an aggregate service where the client invokes a static preconfigured composite service that manages the process chain. The service acts like a standard

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Figure 1.


Service-chaining design principles.

web service in that the client is not aware of individual processing steps and cannot monitor the execution of the services. Given that the majority of users of PPGIS applications are non-expert (Haklay and Tobón 2003), it would not be effective to choose the transparent workflow pattern for integrating assessment models. Consequently, we consider only translucent and opaque service-chaining architectures. To realize these two architectural patterns and create service chains for specific applications, several service-chaining design principles should be considered (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009), namely (1) the workflow control pattern, (2) the data interaction pattern, and (3) the communication pattern (Figure 1). The workflow control pattern is a design strategy related to the management and execution of a service chain. Cascading and centralized chaining methods are two patterns for describing and executing the workflow of service activities (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009) – see Figure 2. The cascading chaining method describes a workflow in which only the service providing the result is invoked directly and the remaining service invocations (e.g., for data retrieval) are managed by the solicited service. This method has some drawbacks in terms of design and validation of the workflow. It can be difficult to manage data extraction, monitoring of workflow execution states, error handling, and dynamic handling of cases in which the workflow behaviour depends on intermediate data (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009). To address such challenges, centralized chaining can be

Figure 2.

Architecture and workflow in a centralized (left) and cascaded (right) control patterns.



11

adopted as an alternative. It describes a workflow of services in which all service invocations are controlled by a central component (e.g., a workflow management module). With this approach, a client application, or a workflow engine, initiates all workflow interaction, and controls management and execution of the workflow. From a software maintenance perspective, one of the main drawbacks of the clientcontrolled approach is that the client needs to be updated should service reference endpoints change, if there are updates to service interfaces, or if a workflow is reconfigured. Therefore, this approach is not suitable for (geo)processing applications in which the workflow is generated by dynamic operation selection and service configurations (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009). To overcome such challenges, FriisChristensen et al. (2009) proposed an engine-controlled approach to manage the execution of a workflow through workflow languages (e.g., BPEL and XLANG) or management services. In a workflow language-based approach, a workflow execution engine is used to handle the sequence of requests to the services. In a service-based approach, the workflow engine is implemented as a service instance itself (e.g., OGC’s WPS: Web Processing Service). Compared to a client-controlled approach, the enginecontrolled approach is more sustainable as it allows the service chain instance to be updated without affecting client applications, and can also be reused in other workflows. Hence, using a centralized chaining pattern, and particularly, an engine-controlled approach, is a logical choice for implementation of a workflow of services that support service-oriented PPGIS. Finally, we note that such services can be implemented either as aggregate services that hide all the details from users, thus following the opaque chaining pattern, or as adjustable service chains that enable users to follow the workflow execution; thus following the translucent chaining pattern (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009). A data interaction pattern describes how data are transferred between services involved in a workflow. Two dominant mechanisms exist for data transportation in a workflow: data passing by value, and data passing by reference (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009). The data passing by value approach transfers data as values between each service in a workflow. While data can be compressed, (geo)processing workflows are usually data-intensive. Data references can minimize data transfer bottlenecks because the approach requires that a common local data store (to the service(s)) be utilized by all services involved in a workflow so that each data element can be uniquely identifiable by a reference. Data referencing enable either a synchronous or asynchronous communication pattern (Friis‐Christensen et al. 2007) to be realized for message exchange between services in the workflow, or between a client and a service chain. However, the synchronous approach is not suited for long-duration geo-processing tasks and can dramatically increase response times, especially when data and processing services are distributed (Friis‐Christensen et al. 2007). Asynchronous communication patterns are a more efficient solution for time-consuming processing operations (Friis-Christensen et al. 2009), as the response does not return immediately to the consumer, but can be retrieved during a different communication session once the process has been completed. To create such communication patterns, the service chain should be capable of managing processing task queues, and accommodate a notification mechanism to inform the service consumer when a task has been completed (or has failed to be completed). To select an appropriate service-chaining architecture, it is necessary to consider the specific requirements of the target application in terms of performance, flexibility, and

12



reusability. For example, from an architectural standpoint, using an opaque chaining pattern improves performance but decreases services reusability and architectural flexibility. Conversely, translucent patterns allow services to be reused in other workflows, but may decrease overall performance. For the platform discussed in this work we adopt a (translucent) workflow engine-controlled approach to design and implement (geo)processing workflows because it simplifies reusability and maintenance. Additionally, we have used data referencing to ‘move’ data between services, and adopted asynchronous mechanisms for time-consuming (geo)processing workflows.

Publishing services: standard interfaces and interoperability Ideally, PPGIS participants are continuously generating new content, which should be stored, evaluated, and shared among other stakeholders to support decisions (Rinner et al. 2008, Díaz et al. 2011). Standard-compatible tools can facilitate discovery, access, processing, and visualization of user-generated information (Zhao and Coleman 2006), and open standards play a key role in the establishment of interoperable systems. Interoperability refers to ‘the capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units’ (ISO 1993). In SOA, services are basic computing units, which can be integrated into larger, complex services to create service-oriented applications. A service is a standards-based, loosely coupled unit composed of a service interface and a service implementation (ISO 1993). The clean separation between ‘what the service offers’ (service interface) and ‘how the service works’ (service implementation) ensures interoperability (Granell et al. 2010b). Web service platforms implemented using SOA principles (also known as W3C services) have resulted in efficient and reliable systems that allow service providers to advertise their capabilities to potential users (Vescoukis et al. 2012). SOA is an enabling infrastructure for realizing interoperability through: (1) consistent descriptions of service interfaces (WSDL: Web Service Description Language), (2) an authoritative message exchange format (SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol), and (3) a standard method for defining the exchange of data (XML and XSD: XML Schema Definition) (Booth et al. 2004). In the geospatial domain, interoperability is achieved by using standard interfaces, standard metadata, and well-known specialized services defined within an SDI framework (Lee and Percivall 2008). Currently, most of the standard services deployed in SDIs use OGC standards (Granell et al. 2010a). These OGC standards enable interoperability through a set of specifications that enable discovery of geospatial resources (e.g., CSW: Catalogue Service – Web), sharing geospatial data (e.g., WFS: Web Feature Service and WCS: Web Coverage Service), geoprocessing capabilities (e.g., WPS), and visualization of geospatial information (e.g., WMS: Web Map Service). However, from a functional perspective, W3C and OGC services represent different standards, which may result in incompatibilities when reusing or integrating services into other workflows5 (Ioup et al. 2008, Amirian et al. 2010, Di Giovanni et al. 2014). This is because (1) unlike W3C services, each OGC service implements a specific standard designed to handle a certain type of data (e.g., a WFS expects vector data, whereas a WCS expects coverage data6), (2) W3C services use only XML and SOAP for communication, while OGC services may use either Key-Value pair (KVP) encoding and HTTP GET, or XML and HTTP POST for interaction, and (3) OGC services can return binary



13

data as well as XML documents, whereas W3C services primarily rely on pure XML response documents7 (Ioup et al. 2008, Amirian et al. 2010). In order to have an effective, fully interoperable solution, both W3C and OGC interfaces should be considered when designing geospatial services (Amirian et al. 2010). Such a solution can be implemented by adding SOAP/WSDL support to OGC services, which will facilitate: (1) dissemination of geospatial resources to a larger community of users (Di Giovanni et al. 2014), and (2) the incorporation of W3C standards into OGC services such as WS-Security, WS-Policy, etc. (Gartmann and Schäffer 2008). Several works have investigated possible solutions that allow W3C and OGC services to communicate (see Di Giovanni et al. (2014) for a detailed review). The challenges that appear when integrating OGC and W3C services have been outlined by Ioup et al. (2008) and include: data handling, functionality mapping, and metadata management issues. Amirian et al. (2010) proposed a standards-based solution to address these challenges. To deal with data type handling, they proposed a common backend approach through which a W3C service and an OGC service provide two separate gateways (i.e., a W3C and an OGC compliant interface) to the same server (i.e., backend). For mapping functionality, they suggested a one-to-many mapping where each data layer of an OGC service is exposed as a W3C service. To address metadata delivery issues, they employed W3C’s WS-Metadata-Exchange specification, which describes a standard format to encapsulate metadata, thus eliminating the need for developing customized solutions for metadata retrieval. OGC has also been involved in developing recommendations and guidelines for adding SOAP/WSDL support to existing and future OGC services (OGC 2006, Di Giovanni et al. 2014). Currently, OGC services such as WPS 1.0 (Schut 2007), WFS 2.0 (Vretanos 2010), and WCS 2.0 (Baumann 2010) support SOAP and WSDL protocols. This facilitates discovery of and access to geospatial resources and enables seamless integration of W3C and OGC services into service chains. In order to implement the e-planning platform, we have chosen to deploy geospatial data and analysis tools using OGC standards. Moreover, we have adopted solutions proposed by Amirian et al. (2010), the OGC guidelines, and best practices to add SOAP/WSDL support. This has increased sharing and reusability of data and services over multiple-use cases. The e-planning platform The e-planning system architecture is a layered architecture consisting of four tiers of modules that include a Presentation Layer, an Application Layer, a Service Layer, and a Data Layer – see Figure 3. Presentation layer The Presentation layer provides front-end application interfaces through which user interactions and content visualization are managed. It has two main components: the Map Viewer and the Social Network UI (User Interface). The UI components deployed in this layer aim to address the design requirements in terms of visualization, sketching, and social networking tools. The Map Viewer can be implemented using many mapping frameworks. We have adopted Leaflet. The map viewer controls visualization of geospatial content, such as the map canvas, map controls, markers, popups, vector/raster data layers, and map-based


14

Figure 3.


The e-planning system architecture.

interactions, such as zoom, pan, and map-objects’ events. Sketching tools are currently under development. These map-based tools are added to the Map Viewer module as plugins. The Social Network UI was developed using the open source social networking platform Elgg (Costello and Sharma 2012). The platform enables the required collaborative (social networking) functions and provides theming through which typical UI visualization elements, such as windows, menus, icons, and widgets can be created or modified using HTML and CSS. Elgg is not tied to a particular Social Network, for instance Facebook, and allows deployment in a manner that is appropriate to a (urban planning) service’s needs, as opposed to some third party add-on. Adoption of Elgg also provides contributors some discretion as their ‘political’ lives can be separated from their ‘social’. More advanced 2D or 3D visualizations, such as interactive diagrams or 3D plans, can be developed with JavaScript libraries such as D3.js and WebGL. As Elgg supports a pluginbased development approach, the required components for the UI (e.g., the Map Viewer) are added as plugins.


15


Application layer The Application layer contains the business logic. It provides service and data integration functions and enables communication between end users and remote services. Four modules including an AJAX Engine, a Social Network Engine, a Service Adapter, and a Workflow Engine address our design principles in terms of social networking tools, service integration, and interoperability. The AJAX Engine plays a central role in managing interactions between the Presentation Layer and the Application Layer modules. It acts as a gateway that facilitates connection to and access of remote services by hiding the complexity of the underlying HTTP calls. Elgg acts as the Social Network Engine, which enables a wide range of social networking functions as shown in Table 3. Elgg also manages interactions between the Social Network UI module in the Presentation layer and the social network services in the Service layer, i.e., the (social) data mining and (social) data discovery services. Moreover, it includes general-purpose modules, common to most current web applications: Session Manager, Authentication Manager, Help Handler, and Error Handler. The Session Manager allows users to save the status of the current planning process and retrieve previous ones. The Authentication Manager allows users to be logged into the system to both start a new planning process and continue with previous ones. The Help Handler provides online contextual help for key items that need to be well understood and interpreted correctly by users. The Error Handler enables provision of detailed error messages.

Table 3.

Sample social networking functions provided by Elgg.

Social networking functions Searching

Linking

Sample Elgg functions

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Authoring

Tagging Extension Signalling

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Keyword search Full-text search Tag-based search Creating groups Inviting friends Sharing content on third-party websites like Facebook Uploading or linking to external contents like videos User management Privacy control Commenting Blogging Bookmarking User-generated keywords Creating tag clouds Plugin-based development approach RSS feeds Messages Email notifications

16



The Workflow Engine supports service integration. It provides a dynamic service composition mechanism in the Application layer to expose modelling, evaluation or planning processes as a set of workflows consisting internally as chains of distributed geospatial services. To execute service chains, various technical configurations can be applied in terms of the workflow architecture, data interaction mechanisms, and communication patterns, thus providing flexibility and scalability to the system. The Service Adapter module facilitates communication with services from the Service layer. It prepares standard service requests for the Workflow Engine and Social Network Engine by translating user queries to standard OGC and SOAP/REST services requests. This enables interoperability among components of the system. Service layer The Service layer contains a set of services that can be classified into two main groups: geospatial and non-geospatial services, see Figure 3 (in different grey tones). Geospatial services are the main part of the service layer and include SDI service types: Discovery, Download, View, and Processing. A discovery service instance (e.g., CSW) offers functionality to search and provide all geospatial data and services catalogued in the spatial database catalogue. A view service instance (e.g., WMS or WMTS) produces maps of spatially referenced data, perhaps dynamically, from geospatial information. A planned download service instance (e.g., WFS) enables users to access geospatial information at the geographic feature level in vector formats such as GML, KML (Keyhole Markup Language), GeoJSON (Geographically Encoded Objects for JavaScript Object Notation), etc. The processing service instance (e.g., WPS) provides geoprocessing functionalities to users across a network, including access to preprogrammed calculations and/or geocomputational models. Non-geospatial services include content discovery services, which are categorized into two service types: social data discovery and social data mining services. Social data discovery enables searching of all social data catalogued in the Social Network Database. A planned social data mining service provides data processing functionality using data search capabilities and statistical algorithms to discover patterns and correlations in the Social Network Database. Elgg provides typical search functions such as keyword search, full-text search, and tag-based search. Advanced search mechanisms such as semanticbased and spatial-based searches are provided by content discovery services deployed in the Service Layer, such as an OGC CSW. Having different types of services grouped in separate clusters, based on their characteristics, facilitates design and development of service-based applications with respect to the desired level of granularity. This service-based development approach enables developers to model a process as a chain of services in which services can be replaced by other services, or reused in other workflows to ensure architectural flexibility. The use of OGC and SOAP/REST service interfaces for publishing geospatial and non-geospatial services facilitates machine–machine and human–machine interactions in a standardscompatible manner, i.e., provides interoperability. Data layer The Data layer is focused on databases, metadata registries for services, and remote data services. It provides data as well as information on data sources to the Service and Application layers. To store and manage geospatial data including urban base data (e.g.,


17

road network, building footprints, land use maps, etc.), point of interest (POI) data (e.g., shops, banks, restaurants, etc.), planning models and sketches, a spatially-enabled database is used – in our case: PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Nowadays, geospatial data are also accessible online through interoperable services, e.g., base layers are provided by WMTS (Web Map Tile Service) servers and POI datasets are available through REST services. These remote datasets are accessed by the e-planning platform as remote data services. Social network data are stored in a MySQL database, as it is the only database that Elgg currently supports. In order to facilitate searching of available services, metainformation is recorded in a database; either a relational database such as PostgreSQL or a document-oriented database such as MongoDB or CouchDB can be used.


Two cases studies: MapYourPlace and WalkYourPlace To demonstrate how the e-planning platform works, two real-world applications using the proposed architecture have been developed. The objective of the first project, MapYourPlace, was to exploit social networking and mapping tools in the design of a community satisfaction survey application. The main goal of the second project, WalkYourPlace, was to develop a standard geoprocessing framework for evaluating neighbourhood accessibility.

The MapYourPlace comment tool MapYourPlace (http://planyourplace.ca/elgg/pypMapComment) provides a map-based discussion forum that enabled users not only to explore their surrounding area but also to submit map-based comments, to vote on, and to respond to other stakeholders’ contributions. The physical architecture of the MapYourPlace application is shown in Figure 4. The user interface is the user’s web browser. The MapYourPlace web page and map client is loaded into the browser from the MapYourPlace Web Server. The map component is provided by the Map Client API, which retrieves a base map from a Base Map Server.

Figure 4.

Physical architecture of the MapYourPlace application.


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The user can create a map-based comment by identifying a location on the map component. Then a web form will appear to allow the user to enter details about the location such as a description of the issue identified, and whether or not it is a positive or negative comment. After submitting the form, the Social Network Engine sends the information to the Data Server to be stored. The system also allows users to explore the contributions of others on the map, to comment on other comments, and to agree or disagree with a particular comment. The MapYourPlace tool was implemented as a standard Elgg plugin. On the client side, we used Leaflet to develop the map component and map-based interactions. In order to prevent visual overload and to improve the usability of the application, we used a clustering plugin,8 which groups nearby comments. User-system interaction functions were programmed in PHP according to the Elgg plugin development approach.9 On the server side, WMTS technology was used to provide the base map. Map data were extracted from the City of Calgary Open Data website, and map tiles were generated using TileMill. The principal server-side component used to serve the map data was PHP TileServer. A MySQL database was used to store and manage spatial and nonspatial data.

The WalkYourPlace tool The WalkYourPlace (http://planyourplace.ca/elgg/pypWalkYourPlace/) application allows users to evaluate accessibility of urban facilities using ‘quality of life’ indicators, such as the number of grocery stores, shopping and recreation facilities, and local crime in Calgary, Alberta, Canada (Steiniger et al. 2013). The system evaluates the area that is accessible using pedestrian, transit, and cycling infrastructure. WalkYourPlace is a first step towards addressing the lack of assessment capabilities in online PPGIS platforms (Steiniger et al. 2012). Figure 5 presents a generalized view of the physical architecture for the WalkYourPlace system. The user interface is the web browser and the entry component,

Figure 5.

A physical perspective of the WalkYourPlace system..



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i.e., the WalkYourPlace web page and map client, is retrieved from the WalkYourPlace Web Server. The user triggers an assessment by identifying a start location on the map component, selecting travel modes, and specifying various travel time information, depending on the transportation mode selected. Then the Workflow Engine will trigger an accessibility evaluation model located on the Accessibility Model Server, for instance the Walking Model. This model, then, performs the evaluation by obtaining data from the Data Server, and by interacting with the different services on the Back-end Processing Server(s). The interactions between the WalkYourPlace user and the system are carried out using XML-HTTP-Requests (XHR), managed using AJAX. Communication and data delivery between the system components are accomplished using standards from W3C and OGC, which include: (1) W3C’s REST architectural style, (2) (Geo)JSON for data interchange, (3) OGC’s WPS to implement the different accessibility models, and (4) OGC’s WMTS Implementation standard to display zoom-able maps of the urban area in the map client. The WalkYourPlace system includes five accessibility models: WalkScore, WalkYourPlace, Cycling, Walking, and Transit & Walking.10 Each model consists of several WPS services and performs accessibility analysis through chaining of WPS instances in a multi-step pattern or workflow. To achieve desired application flexibility, service reusability, and improve performance, the (translucent) workflow-managed chaining method was used. Table 4 lists the service instances deployed for each model. The processing sequence for estimating an accessibility score is as follows (see Figure 6): the client sends a WPS execute command to the Management WPS, the Workflow Engine, which then initiates an execute call to the Walkshed WPS. The Walkshed WPS returns a GeoJSON polygon of the network-based accessibility area. The Management WPS then sends an execute request to the Point-of-Interest (POI) WPS to find all attractors within the accessibility area. The POI WPS returns a set of local services/ amenities encoded as GeoJSON points, along with attributes describing the types of features found. The Management WPS then repeats the same request to the Crime WPS to obtain crime locations and their type. Finally, the Management WPS sends an execute request to the Aggregation WPS along with the accessibility polygon and the responses from the POI and Crime WPS’s. The response from the Aggregation WPS is the accessibility score, a crime score, and the accessibility area. The Management WPS then returns the coloured accessibility area and the accessibility score to the client for presentation. The implementation of the WalkYourPlace tool uses Leaflet plugged into Elgg for the display of and interaction with maps. On the server side, we run a Linux-ApacheMySQL-Python/PHP configuration. The geoprocessing services were implemented using Java and Python with GeoServer, and exposed as standard WPS services. WMTS technology (i.e., PHP TileServer) was used to provide the base map tiles, which were created in TileMill using OpenStreetMap data. Crime data and transit schedule data, provided by the City of Calgary, are stored in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. Bike and walk access areas are calculated using an OpenTripPlanner service instance (through REST) that evaluates the OpenStreetMap street network. Finally, POI datasets are fetched from OpenStreetMap using the Overpass API.11 Evaluation of the architecture To effectively evaluate the proposed architecture, it is useful to assess both performance and usability metrics of the case study systems to verify whether the system design

20 Table 4.

M.E. Poorazizi et al. A list of service instances deployed within the WalkYourPlace system.


WYP service Service type

Service processes

View

WMTS

N/A

Processing

WPS

Management

Description Provides the base maps of the urban area. Calls and controls the execution of workflows, i.e., accessibility models.

Walkshed

Calculates the walk accessibility area.

Bikeshed

Calculates the cycling accessibility area. Provides attractions within accessibility areas.

POI

Crime

Identifies crimes committed within accessibility areas.

Transit

Calculates the transit accessibility areas. Computes a geometric union of accessibility areas, i.e., walksheds. Calculates accessibility score (0–100) based on the number and type of POI objects within accessibility areas. Generates a coloured polygon (green-red) based on the type and number of crimes committed within accessibility areas.

Union

Aggregation

Accessibility model N/A

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

WalkScore WalkYourPlace Walking Cycling Transit & Walking Walking Transit & Walking Cycling

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

WalkScore WalkYourPlace Walking Cycling Transit & Walking WalkYourPlace Walking Cycling Transit & Walking Transit & Walking

● Transit & Walking

● ● ● ● ●

WalkScore WalkYourPlace Walking Cycling Transit & Walking

successfully meets users’ needs. Usability metrics could include efficiency, satisfaction of the platform, effectiveness, perceived ease of use, flexibility of deployment, and quality of documentation. Performance metrics might include quality of service (QoS) criteria such as performance and scalability to determine efficiency and effectiveness of the platform under specific conditions. So far, we have carried out a performance evaluation for the WalkYourPlace transit model with a selection of WPS servers (i.e., 52°North, deegree, GeoServer, PyWPS, and Zoo).



Figure 6. score.

21

Sequence diagram for the calculation of the WalkYourPlace pedestrian accessibility area

In terms of performance, there was no significant difference in system response time (F(4, 220) = 0.739, P = 0.566), nor data volume returned (F(4, 220) = 1.071, P = 0.372) – response document data volume varied between WPS because each WPS structured their response document differently – regardless of which WPS was used. The architecture continued to perform under all load tests undertaken. Any failures to respond to a client request using the architecture were due to a WPS failure rather than an architectural failure. From a developer’s perspective, there were no limitations encountered that would suggest circumspection in the use of the architecture in an e-planning environment. The full evaluation results can be found in Poorazizi and Hunter (2014).

Discussion and conclusions We have presented a framework for the development of an e-participation platform that enables citizen engagement in urban planning activities. To realize the framework, we determined design characteristics based on SOA principles, SDI guidelines and standards, and Web 2.0 concepts and technologies. The architecture allows heterogeneous data sources, analytical functions and tools, communication and deliberation mechanisms, and presentation frameworks to be plugged into a coherent system to


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provide an e-planning and decision support platform. The system is flexible, as indicated by the two case studies presented, and supports interoperability and extensibility through standard compliance and modularization. To implement the architecture, we employed and recommend using a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) strategy for two main reasons. First, it minimizes the potential cost, i.e., software licensing, required to implement, modify, or customize the system. Second, it facilitates the free adoption of the platform by communities who generally have limited budgets, and by cities and other organizations interested in community development. Conformance to spatial and World Wide Web standards allows developers to design and build PPGIS applications with their specific requirements, using various technologies and tools (e.g., FOSS or proprietary), as the architecture supports a ‘pluggable’ development approach, and provides the flexibility necessary to allow changes or customization of the system. Our two case studies demonstrate how to exploit Web 2.0 tools and social networking functions to create a socio-technical platform. The applications enable citizens to visualize, manipulate, and discuss community-planning projects via the Internet. We expect this will improve citizen’s e-participation experience, and enable the realization of sustainable planning practices. However, a long-term study to evaluate whether the platform does meet this expectation still needs to be performed. The architecture has been designed for an e-planning environment, and as such is confined to online participation. This presents a limitation, as those without Internet connection will be unable to access systems developed using the proposed architecture. Therefore, it does not provide an alternative medium to traditional in-person meetings for those without Internet access. This ‘digital divide’ (Katz and Aspden 1997, Hoffman and Novak 1998, Van Dijk 2006, Blank 2013) has been the subject of much research, but these works tell us that access alone is not sufficient to ensure that citizens become broad participants on the Internet (Hargittai 2002, Peter and Valkenburg 2006, Van Dijk 2006). The digital divide has been recast as more an issue of differential access, literacy, and use (Crang et al. 2006, Brandtzæg et al. 2011). For instance, Meyen et al. (2010) developed a typology of Internet users and concluded that the younger and well educated types (the Virtuosi, the Professionals, the Addicts, and the Companions) were more likely to engage via the Internet. Also, Kelley (2014) concluded that for communities that were at the centre of the earlier digital divide (no access to the Internet), i.e., the poor, the rural, the nonelite, these newer informational dimensions of exclusion are exceedingly more difficult to overcome. This suggests that e-planning systems based on this architecture, may in fact reinforce existing sociopolitical stratification, and produce outcomes that are less representative. To this end, further research is necessary to ensure that implementations align with the less powerful and do not contribute to reproducing the power of the already dominant (Law and Urry 2004). Transparency, deliberative reasoning, and publicity must be built into decision-making processes. The system must encourage those who are usually dominant to account for themselves in public and listen to the perspectives of others. As such, e-planning needs to become more attendant to outcomes – not simply in terms of whether participants trusted the process, but in terms of the political efficacy of citizens, and of decisions made. As Bang and Esmark (2009) suggest, new modes of governance have placed great emphasis on the democratization of citizen input, but without outputs, no form of collective action, including talk, amounts to much. Online deliberation is not an alternative to political decision-



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making, but a means of enhancing it. In any representative democracy, deliberation by the public, stakeholders, and decision makers is but one stage in the complex process of turning organized preferences into implementable policy. The framework developed in this work cannot answer these demands directly, but it does offer the opportunity to address these issues because of the standards used to build the system. Regarding the primary quality attribute requirements and business goals (Barbacci et al. 2003, Kazman and Bass 2005) that drove system development (see Appendix B), we conclude via review that quality attributes such as scalability/extensibility, open systems/ standards, and interoperability are all met in the proposed architecture. The secondary priorities, performance, flexibility, integrability, security, ease-of-installation, ease-of-use, and functionality have been built into the system through the adoption of development ‘best practices’ throughout the design process. Lower level priorities such as distributed development and ease-of-repair are met. For future work, we will complete the evaluation of the platform to identify design limitations and further refine the platform. This demands that we also study mechanisms that enable integration of the system into existing decision-making processes. We are currently working on the performance evaluation of WPS servers deployed in both local and cloud computing environments where we are assessing the effect of complexity on geoprocessing services workflows and service chaining architectures. Test plans to conduct usability testing of the system to identify strengths and weaknesses of the current system are under development. Given the increasing popularity of mobile devices and location-based services, full integration of the e-planning platform with mobile technology is desirable. For that, the service-oriented design is advantageous as it enables creation of platform-independent solutions without the need to install additional software. However, some software-related issues need to be addressed to make the e-planning architecture fully compatible with mobile environments. For example, as mobile devices have limited screen space, a mobile-specific UI needs to be developed to improve users’ interaction with small touchscreen displays. Moreover, as the proposed platform supports a plugin-based development approach, additional software components should be developed to leverage mobile sensors (e.g., GPS, camera, etc.) and, therefore, improve the interaction opportunities offered by a mobile version of the e-planning platform. Finally, specific mobile geospatial services (e.g., view/download services) must be developed to facilitate transmission of data (e.g., base map tiles) in low-bandwidth conditions, similar to the image quality API provided by MapBox web services (Miller 2014).

Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Canadian NEPTIS Foundation and GEOIDE (Grant TSII 202).

Notes 1. 2.

3.

‘Local’ in the sense of an SDI for a smaller, locally focused user community. The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was adopted on 25 June 1998 in Aarhus, Denmark: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/ welcome.html. See http://www.opengeospatial.org.

24 4. 5.


6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

M.E. Poorazizi et al. According to Fischer and Herrmann (2011), socio-technical platforms consider the interaction between people and technology. Generally speaking, they are composed of (1) computers, networks, and software, and (2) people, procedures, and policies, etc. For example, workflow management systems such as Taverna (http://www.taverna.org.uk/) and service orchestration engines such as Apache ODE (http://ode.apache.org/) rely on a SOAP interface and a WSDL description to build complex workflows of services and to execute them, whereas OGC WPS must be wrapped in an additional WSDL layer if it is to be combined seamlessly with W3C workflows such as WS-BPEL (Granell 2014). Difficulties can arise with this process as the design of OGC WPS assumes some human intervention, whereas W3C services do not (Schade et al. 2012). The outcome is that WPS endpoints may not always translate directly, nor completely, to WSDL execution endpoints. Spatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena. However, there are several approaches to extend data handling capabilities of W3C services, thus enabling binary data exchange (e.g., transferring images). See Zhang et al. (2007) for a detailed discussion. https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.markercluster/ http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Plugin_development/ The WalkScore model is an implementation of walkscore.com’s model described in WalkScore (2011). See Steiniger et al. (2013) for a description of the WalkYourPlace, Cycling, Walking, and Transit & Walking models. http://overpass-api.de/

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Appendix A. The following table lists software applications and libraries mentioned in this article.

Software/Library NET Web ADF Adobe Flex ArcGIS Server ArcIMS ArcSDE Chameleon CouchDB D3.js Django web framework Elgg Ext JS GeoTools Google App Engine Google Maps Leaflet Leaflet.markercluster MapBox MapServer MongoDB MySQL OpenLayers PHP TileServer phpBB PostgreSQL/PostGIS Ruby on Rails Node.js Sketch.js SQL Server WebGL

Website http://resources.arcgis.com/content/web-adf-microsoft-net-framework http://www.adobe.com/ca/products/flex.html http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisserver http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcims http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcsde http://chameleon.maptools.org/index.phtml http://couchdb.apache.org/ http://d3js.org/ https://www.djangoproject.com/ http://elgg.org/ http://extjs.com/products/extjs/ http://geotools.org/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/ https://developers.google.com/maps/ http://leafletjs.com/ https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.markercluster https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js http://mapserver.org/ http://www.mongodb.org/ http://www.mysql.com/ http://openlayers.org/ https://github.com/infostreams/mbtiles-php/ https://www.phpbb.com/ http://www.postgresql.org/ http://rubyonrails.org/ http://nodejs.org/ http://intridea.github.io/sketch.js/ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/default.aspx http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl/

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Appendix B.


e-Planning architecture business goals.

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