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

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.