Standards-based, interoperable services for accessing urban services data for the city of Tehran

The availability of reliable and ubiquitous urban services data is a key component of successful city management. The inability of traditional bureaucratic public administration to meet citizens’ needs effectively has led to a search for new methods that grant more efficient, effective and reliable provision of services to citizens. Because there are many users with distinct computing platforms and preferences, urban services data must be accessible using interoperable solutions. Numerous solutions for providing interoperability are proposed by the Geospatial Information (GI) community, as well as the Information Technology (IT) community. The most widely used technologies for providing interoperability in the GI community are OGC services framework. In the IT community, Web services technologies provide full potential interoperability among heterogeneous computing platforms. However, these two kinds of services are not directly compatible. To provide an interoperable solution, OGC services and Web services should be integrated efficiently. The underlying issue in integrating OGC services and Web services is the gap between the predefined functionality inherent in the OGC services, and the lack of any predefined functionality in the Web services technologies. This paper identifies the implementation issues in integrating OGC services and Web services and then proposes standards-based approaches to overcome these integration issues. Afterwards, the paper explains the design and development of Standards-based Interoperable Services for Accessing Urban Services Data (SISAUSD).