Editors: Frank Stowell, Manuel Mora

The management of a territory is a complex process, involving a number of different operators, administrators and decision makers. Territory management requires accessing and processing a wide range of heterogeneous and multi-dimensional GI (GI). Within a typical scenario, the process involves departments at public administrations responsible for urban planning, environmental control, infrastructure planning and maintenance. Additionally units such as civil protection, fire brigades also play a vital role when dealing with emergencies. Data to be managed range from alphanumerical information, stored within enterprise-level databases, to satellite imagery, vector data and information coming from on-site sensors. It is acknowledged that creating an infrastructure capable to provide access to such a range of information requires, an integrated system approach, both from a technological and from a procedural point of view. This article illustrates the benefit of adopting a system approach which makes use of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and 3D geobrowsers to provide an answer to the aforementioned shortcomings. To do so the article presents the client-server platform designed to support decision makers and experts from local or regional administrations in the process of managing their territory. The infrastructure developed allows a large number of concurrent applications to access geographical data in a fully interactive way, within a 3D environment, thus providing support to territorial and environmental management tasks. The work illustrates also the results of the application of the infrastructure within a real-life scenario, thus providing the chance to discuss of implications of adopting such an approach.

DOI: 10.4018/jitsa.2010100204 ISSN: 1935-570X EISSN: 1935-571