Map Asia 2003 Land Information System Map Asia Conference 2003 ©GISdevelopment.net, All rights reserved. Geospatial Interoperability via the Web: Supporting Land Administration in Kuala Lumpur Mr Sanphet Chunithipaisan 1 Mr Philip James 1 Sanphet.Chunithipaisan@ncl.ac.uk Philip.James@ncl.ac.uk Prof David Parker 1 Mr Zainal Abdul Majeed 1 Mr Simon Abele 1 David.Parker@ncl.ac.uk Zainal.Abdul-Majeed@ncl.ac.uk Simon.Abele@ncl.ac.uk 1 School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Abstract This paper highlights a number of issues currently facing the access, delivery and use of geospatial information (GI) via the World Wide Web (WWW, Web). Taking a practical, rather than conceptual approach, particular focus has been placed on the need for the identification and application of existing geospatial interoperable standards in addressing some of these issues. Therefore a range of solutions have been developed around the provision of land information and administration within Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As widely as possible existing geospatial interoperable standards, protocols and technologies have been used to develop solutions to the problems discussed in this paper. The research also highlights some of the problems encountered in implementing current geospatial standards. Background and Motivation There are a number of GIS used in organisations to manage, maintain and distribute their data. Organisations maintain and provide specialised data according to their functions, however in many cases users or even organisations themselves need other datasets for a particular application. The data integration between different systems is not straightforward and time consuming [1]. Likewise proprietary data formats are a major obstruction for data integration. Moreover, the addition and integration of data into existing databases poses many additional challenges. The growth of Internet access and use coupled with advancements in web based technologies over the past decade has provided new possibilities for the access, delivery and use of GI [6]. In recent years the GI sector has begun to recognise the importance and role of the web for the dissemination of spatial information, with many GI technology vendors now offering extended systems of Internet Map Server (IMS) to their desktop products e.g. ArcIMS, Geomedia, GE Smallworld IMS. The development of such systems has introduced and highlighted issues pertinent to the use of GI via the web. However, such systems still require data in their own proprietary formats. Proprietary IMS also typically disseminate these data in a proprietary format. In many cases we need to combine and distribute data from multiple heterogeneous systems. This requirement is hard to achieve using existing GIS. Several organisations are now actively involved in addressing the problems of geospatial interoperability. The most prominent of these being the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) which has developed and put forward a number of specifications and standards, aimed at promoting data sharing and dissemination amongst the GI community. Increasingly OGC specifications [5] are being adopted and implemented by GI technology vendors and users to provide solutions to the problems of web based GI dissemination. In particular; the Geographic Markup Language (GML) and web map services (e.g. Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS)) looks set to play an increasingly crucial role in the future distribution of GI and services. The basic operation of requesting and retrieving data are performed via Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and uses the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol to pass the request details.