The provision of usable and user-tailored information has become a critical success factor for local governments in view of ever increasing shortages of human and financial resources combined with an extended scope of municipal tasks and growing requirements in the quality of works performed. Yet, raw materials for information processing, data collected within various procedures in the individual fields, are available. For this reason, the primary task of a municipal information management is to provide planning and controlling personnel with updated, user-need-oriented and individual information regardless of data sources and contents. At an early stage, the City of Cologne has started to develop modern information technologies which have been further developed to an integrated cross-functional and trans-organisational data warehouse solution within research projects funded accordingly by the European Union. Right from the beginning, the particular significance of spatial reference - not only in terms of traffic and environment - has been taken into consideration, and has led to the development of the Strategical Information System (SIS). This system connects operational data resources of automated administrative procedures such as civil, motor vehicle, or trade and business registration with a problem-related provision of information in planning and management fields in city local governments. One of the performance features of this system is to support spatial components which are important in many administrative domains through the creation of a spatial reference system and the integration of spatial reference applications (for example for the traffic and environmental sector) and efficient Standard-Geo-Information Systems.
Abstract