Abstract
Nowadays, the availability of authoritative geospatial features of various data themes is becoming wider on global, regional and national levels. The reason is existence of legislative frameworks for public sector information and related spatial data infrastructure implementations, emergence of support for initiatives as open data, big data ensuring that online geospatial information are made available to digital single market, entrepreneurs and public bodies on both national and local level. However, the availability of authoritative reference spatial data linking the geographic representation of the properties and their owners are still missing in an appropriate quantity and quality level, even though this data represent fundamental input for local governments regarding the register of buildings used for property tax calculations, identification of illegal buildings, etc. We propose a methodology to improve this situation by applying the principles of participatory GIS and VGI used to collect observations, update authoritative datasets and verify the newly developed datasets of areas of buildings used to calculate property tax rates issued to their owners. The case study was performed within the district of the City of Požega in eastern Croatia in the summer 2015 and resulted in a total number of 16072 updated and newly identified objects made available online for quality verification by citizens using open source geospatial technologies.
Highlights
Local governments at the municipality level make policy decisions directly affecting citizens’ life on a daily basis
We propose a methodology to improve this situation by applying the principles of participatory GIS and voluntary geographic information (VGI) used to collect observations, update authoritative datasets and verify the newly developed datasets of areas of buildings used to calculate property tax rates issued to their owners
MATERIALS AND METHODS Constructed by the main goal of the research study, the methodology consisted of the following steps (Figure 1): i) analysis of the data available from the local Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and authoritative data available from state geodetic administration; ii) harmonization of input data based on gap analysis and identified improvement requests; iii) data collection; iv) data processing v) new database modelling and integration of input / processed data, raw field observations and user needs identified for the final system, vi) authorized data publication and verification based on open source geospatial information (GI) technologies
Summary
Local governments at the municipality level make policy decisions directly affecting citizens’ life on a daily basis. Participatory GIS approaches used to collect spatial data in order to update the property systems deployed as local SDI can considerably support decisions of a local government These days, the academy mostly plays a role of educator and at the same time could be seen a professional supporter of public administration bodies. The later often lacks resources and related expertise to produce spatial data, outsourcing the work to academia is an optimal solution This is one of the cornerstones of a knowledge based economy where the appropriate management of the relationship between the state executive bodies on local level and academy institutions is vital to a strong and dynamic future for these institutions (George, 2006).
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