COMPILING, ORGANIZING, STRUCTURING AND PUBLISHING IN THE INTERNET THE URBAN PLANNING OF THE WHOLE GALICIA REGION José Luís Álvarez, Alberto Redondo, Josep Fargas Planning Head of Consellería de Política Territorial Obras Públicas e Vivenda of Xunta de Galicia Director of Technological Assessment Commission of Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Galicia Director of DTEC Consulting, S.L. The regional government of Galicia jointly with the Association of Architects of Galicia and the collaboration of DTEC Consulting, S.L. have undertaken the task of systematically compiling, scanning, organizing, structuring the data and publishing in the Internet the complete Urban Planning of the whole Galicia region in Spain. This effort includes graphical data as maps, as well as all the legal planning texts and information associated with the different planning documents. All this information covers a territory of around 30.000 square kilometers with more than 300 municipalities. All this effort has been carried away by a team of 4 architects, responsible of capturing, interpreting and organizing the data, lead by a multidisciplinary team of specialists that have designed, jointly with the group of architects, a specific application to systematize, organize, store, manipulate and finally publish in the Internet all the planning information. The following paper exposes the task undertaken and particularly shows the strategy used in the project to be able to scan, organize and publish coherently more than 50,000 documents developed by very diverse sources of information and without having neither a common structure nor a common format. The paper also shows the technical process and technology used to scan and prepare individual maps, to provide navigation through a continuous territory under a web interface, and to give maps a quality comparable to vector maps, but without penalizing the system s performance. Finally, the paper also shows how the data is organized through meta-data tables, which allow editing and maintaining the information up-to-date without the need of reprogramming any computer code, using a specific application that drives the architect-operator through the complete process, from scanning to publishing and generating the web. THE GOAL Xunta de Galicia jointly with Galicia s Association of Architects decided to undertake the project of publishing in the Internet the Urban Planning of the whole Galicia region with its 315 municipalities and all the province level urban planning legislation. The project idea was to build the urban planning portal of Galicia providing all the up-to-date information of any point of the territory with a simple mouse click. This idea was especially ambitious considering that in many parts of Galicia, due to the successive changes and modifications of planning, just knowing what is state of the present legislation might be complex, and might require the assistance of the local planning experts of the municipality. On the other hand, the magnitude of the project was the biggest concern. The urban planning of Galicia has around 3,500 different planning documents (1,202 master plans and 2,132 development plans), and we expect to scan more than 50,000 components, from which more than 17,000 master plan documents have already been scanned. At present, the web has 277,032 map tiles in 1,036 folders using 31,2 Gb of space. In terms of downloadable documents, at present, the web has 16,500 downloadable components from which 3,300 are legal texts in PDF format and 13,000 are the original legal maps in jpeg format for web downloading. The complexity was also incremented by the eclecticism of the planning documents, written by different architects teams under very different criteria, thus, we had the added difficulty of having to systematize the different planning contents under the same application data model, structure and user interface. For this purpose, Galicia Association of Architects, being responsible for bringing the work force to undertake the task, selected four young architects to spend three years to accomplish the project and contracted DTEC Consulting, S.L. to direct the project, define the data structure and architecture, develop the computer system, and define the web during the first year that just finished.
THE PROJECT The project started with little ambition, just pretending to publish the legal maps in jpeg format and the legal texts or regulations in PDF format in a somehow organized manner. It was not possible to publish the information in vector format, since it is not available for many municipalities, and the information is too diverse to be published under the same system. We decided, though, to do some more research, to investigate the possibility of enabling maps navigation through the web, since, for most users, this is the natural way of finding planning information. Then, we saw the possibility of making a raster mosaic of each planning document scanned component maps, if we would find a way to georeference these to the territory. In almost all the cases, this was possible with a little manual effort. In addition, we needed to cut and rotated each of the component maps to build an accurate planning mosaic. To make the problem a little more complex, we also needed to find a way to ensure the best possible display quality of the maps at the different scales of visualization or zooms. We used tiff format files with jpeg compression and the so-called overviews. An overview is a smaller, reduced-resolution representation of a larger image, stored in the same file as the original image data. The overviews allow the software, in our case GeoMedia from Intergraph, to choose the best overview of the file for display in each scale of visualization. In addition, overviews can significantly reduce image display times by displaying overviews rather than the full resolution image. They can also reduce the amount of memory the system needs in order to display and redisplay the image, and they enable to see the same image in one window at a lower, or zoomed out resolution while displaying an area of detail in another window at a higher resolution. Again, the complexity of all these processes and the enormous amount of files to process implied the need of providing a computer assistant that will drive the operator through all the processes involved from scanning the file, to naming, storing, cutting, rotating, associating the file with its planning data, and finally publishing it in the web. In another order of complexity, the operators also needed the assistance of a computer system that will ensure the coherency of the scanned information, by automatically associating it to other complementary information in the database and by providing a simple visualization of the database information. For this purpose, we designed a data structure and a system architecture that will represent the whole planning information in a simple way and in function of the publishing needs. We also designed specific software that will drive the computer operators through all the processes involved in the creation, edition, modification and publication of the system s information. THE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE, FUNCTIONALITIES AND DATA STRUCTURE On the first hand, we decided that the web and the scanning application, called FastWebPro Manager, would share the same database. This strategy allows seeing any change made from the application automatically published in the web, and, more important, provides an integrated user interface to manage all the information of the system, as shown in the figure below. Web FWP Manager DB Figure 1: General working scheme In terms of the planning data structure, given the diversity and eclecticism of the planning documents, we realized the need of defining a very specific vocabulary or taxonomy of planning to be able to make all the team understand the same concepts. Thus, we defined three basic concepts: document, element and component. A document is literally the box that contains the planning project, which is composed of different elements under different types of supports, mainly texts, maps or graphics, etc. In turn, each element can be composed of one or more components. For example, the so-called base planning map of a municipality can be composed of several maps that need to be scanned and related to the previous concepts. In addition, the components or maps can have some information common to the rest of the components of the same element. This is the case of the map legend that it is usually the same for all the maps of the same set. Finally, the different planning documents of a municipality can be composed of navigable cartographies at different scales. In this sense, we defined a link as a shortcut to a specific cartography, shown from another cartography set with a bigger scale of visualization. These dynamic links represent a very intuitive and efficient way to graphically jump from one map to another one, and they are usually used to represent elements, but they can also be used to access documents. The figure below shows the conceptual main planning data entities hierarchy and their relationships, all the way down to the scanned information.
Municipality document document document document element element element legend link component component component legend link Figure 2: Planning information data structure and scanned information relationship Once the data model is established, we need to pay a big attention to the scanning process. The scanning process involves two different aspects that we call the logical and the physical scanning processes, which solutions are the main clues to ensure the success of the system. As shown in the picture below, the logical scanning process groups several processes from the definition of the document and all its elements and components to the generation of the different cartographies. documen t elemen t dynami c LOGICAL SCANNING componen static legen d Figure 3: Definition of the main data structure entities by the logical scanning process On the other hand, what we call the physical scanning process involves the association of the scanned file with its corresponding component or final entity in the database, process that defines a file available from the web, as shown in the picture below. PHYSICAL SCANNING cartography file defined component association published file Figure 4: Physical scanning process of a file for publishing in the web
Thus, the logical scanning process builds and ensures the integrity of the document information tree with all its metadata information to allow its publication in the web automatically. To accomplish all the preceding, the specific scanning application, FastWebPro Manager, not only associates a file to its corresponding component, but also allows navigation through the whole system s database. THE TOOLS There is no need to mention that the overall process was quite difficult to launch due to many different reasons. On the one hand, we needed to fine-tune the technology and solve many different and specific problems, and on the other hand, we needed to set up a human team of very different personalities to work as a whole and managing the same concepts in a systematic manner. FastWebPro Manager, what we call the scanning application, provides computer operators a systematic environment to scan, manage, query and build the information of the system. The following figure shows the main form of the application, where we can observe the three main entities of the system, the document, the element and the component, with two other buttons below to manage the different cartographies and their associated legends. Figure 5: Main menu of the scanning application, FastWebPro Manager As a technical note, FastWebPro Manager is an application written in Visual Basic 6 that connects to GeoMedia and drives it to generate all the navigable static cartographies. The system s database uses MS-Access for development and Oracle for the published Xunta de Galicia version. The web is programmed in ASP 3.0 and javascript using two different resolutions of 800x600 pixels and 1024x768 pixels. The following three figures show the main forms of the three main entities of the system (document, element and component). The example below shows the case of Ourense s municipality. Figure 6: Document form of FastWebPro Manager In the figure below, which shows the element form, it is interesting to note that Ourense has 84 different planning documents. By selecting one of these documents, the application shows the elements associated to it. In the example
below, we can observe that the document selected has 6 associated elements, and in the component form, we can see that the selected element has 18 components, in this case corresponding to the maps of Ourense s urban land classification. As we can observe, the application allows navigation through each of the objects and their hierarchy, and it is interesting to note that the selected element has a bounding box and an associated dynamic link. The bounding box allows finding all the elements that affect any specific point of the territory when navigating through the web. As we pointed out before, the dynamic link is just a short cut to the specific components of the element or cartography, corresponding to all the maps of Ourense s urban land, in the case below. Figure 7: Element form of FastWebPro Manager Figure 8: Component form of FastWebPro Manager The last interesting aspect to point out is the cartography manager, shown in the figure below. The cartography manager form allows the user to define the different cartographies associated to a document and relates them to their specific geoworkspaces of GeoMedia, the base GIS software used by the system, setting the full file path automatically. In
addition, a button assists the user to process all the different maps. As shown in the right figure below, the different manipulations of the graphic maps are: - Cutting and rotating the images (the application launches Photoshop) - Confirming or canceling the process - Generating the overviews using the Image Raster Utilities of Intergraph - Generating automatically a new geoworkspace in GeoMedia for georeferencing the maps - Checking the results visually by opening GeoMedia - Generating the maps to be published in the web, according to the size of the tiles and the different levels of zoom defined in the cartography form, by opening GeoMedia and launching a batch process to capture all the tiles THE WEB Figure 9: Cartography form of FastWebPro Manager and file manger form The web allows a detailed access to all the specific urban planning maps, regulations and their modifications of the 315 municipalities of Galicia, as well as to the province level urban planning legislation. The following figure shows Galicia s web home of the Urban Planning Internet portal with the different planning information options. The first option shows the urban planning link for municipal or province level information, collapsed in white. The second option expanded in yellow, shows the links to the urban legislation with three options. Figure 10: Home of the planning Internet portal showing the urban planning and legislation links
The next two figures show all the general and specific urban legislation options. These urban legislations are hosted in different servers and maintained by different people. Figure 11: General (left) and specific (right) urban legislation links All the planning cartography is available under the municipal urban planning link. The following figure shows the main entry point of the municipal urban planning with the map of Galicia, its four provinces (A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra) and all the municipalities represented as blue dots accessible through hot links. In addition, the user can access the same municipal information by choosing the right options in the pull-down menus on the right, and the four province level regulations, accessible under these pull-down menus, showing all Ourense s province planning available information. Figure 12: Map of Galicia as shown in the web with the municipality of Ourense tool-tip text By choosing a municipality, the web shows a window that includes information of the municipality, a link to generate a dynamic planning summary of the municipality and a link to jump to its master plan as a default option. The following figures show the window that allows generating the municipality general information and planning summary with different options (on the left), the municipality general information window (on the right) and the planning summary dynamic report of the municipality (on the bottom). It is interesting to point out that the report can include all the dependencies between documents, since the planning process can be quite complex, and all the components of each planning element, for example, all the maps of a planning element.
Figure 13: Summary of Ourense s urban planning documents and information access and report In the case of the example for Ourense, the figure below shows the urban planning map with the different navigation options underneath and a menu on the right of the map containing the different navigable cartographies, the legend of dynamic links and the master plan and urban development menus. The example below also shows the dynamic links legend expanded, as well as the development urban planning menu. The user can turn on and off dynamic links by clicking the desired entries. The web has also specific buttons to access an online help and the information of the municipality, to jump back to Galicia s index map, to open the static map legend (on the bottom of the map view) and to print out the map view, which will be explained below. Figure 14: Map of the municipality of Ourense as shown in the web
The next figure shows a zoom over the general layout element of the master plan document of Ourense. As shown in the example, all planning documents are sorted by type (either general or development) and clicking on the desired element, a window opens showing all its components. The previously mentioned entities, document and element, are also available through the menu on the right, where we can observe the first document in yellow with all its components inside a grey frame. Next figure 16 shows the window with all the components of the previous first element of the first document of Ourense, corresponding to the general layout of its master plan. A mouse click on one component downloads it from the server, either in jpeg raster format for maps or in PDF for regulations and legislation texts. An interesting feature of the component list window is that the button filter allows the user to filter the component list according to the map view coordinates, to display only the maps contained in the current view. This functionality, based on the element bounding box concept explained before, is very intuitive and useful given that, for some municipalities, the list can be very extensive and the user might be interested only in the subset of visible maps. The window also allows the user to filter the components by a string. Figure 15: Zoom on the base map of Ourense master plan, showing the dynamic links of an element Figure 16: List of all the components of Ourense s master plan base map element Another interesting functionality, shown in the above figure 15, is the dynamic links of Ourense s urban layout element. As mentioned before, the web allows having graphic dynamic links of elements over other larger scale elements. In this
example, Ourense s urban layout link sits on top of its master plan base map element. Clicking with the mouse on the link automatically changes the visible cartography to the one linked to the clicked element. This is the alternative graphical way to navigate from the different elements of a document. CONCLUSION In our opinion, the work accomplish has several importance aspects. On the one hand, the navigable scanned maps level of quality obtained is more than acceptable, and it is ensured for the 3,500 documents of Galicia. This leads to the second important aspect that refers to the enormous dimension of the project, information compilation and planning systematization accomplished by the project team that, for the first time, will imply a big step towards the democratization of the urban planning information of the whole Galicia region. In addition, we develop an application based on a specific working methodology that ensures coherency in the many aspects and procedures involved in publishing any single planning information, providing a unique integrated system, which is the basis of its information maintenance sustainability. Finally, the new urban planning portal of Galicia will become an indispensable tool for any person or any technical expert related to the urban planning sector. This is indeed a pioneer project in Spain and will probably become an example of how to proceed to make available to the whole community very sensible, difficult to compile and voluminous information. BIOGRAPHY OF THE PRESENTING AUTHOR Josep Fargas is an architect from Barcelona, Spain who received a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a research affiliate of MIT and taught at the Barcelona School of Architecture, where he also participates in several master s courses, as well as in the Catalan Association of Architects. He is the founding partner of DTEC Consulting, S.L. since 1994 and he is responsible for both managerial and technical aspects of consulting services offered to the architecture, engineering and construction industry and to planning institutions, in basic research, CAD, GIS, modeling and project management. He is also member of Spanish Association of Urban Planners, member of Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture and member of Spanish Association of Geographical Information Systems. He has made several publications in the field of information technology applied to CAD, GIS and design methods. DTEC is a design technologies consulting specialized since 1994 in the advice, analysis, diagnosis, development of proposals and execution of different projects that need a strong computer based technology to accomplish them. A common feature that our projects share is their graphical and territorial aspect founded in Computer Aided Design and Geographical Information Systems. Each project integrates these technologies with an accurate database management, specific data structures development, appropriate working methods implementation and simulation models execution, which result in the creation of useful systems for decision-making support. Our clients range from the public administration area to professional associations, institutions and public or private companies. Some of the projects we have carried out are the systematization of the whole Catalan Urban Planning information and GIS, the development of urban settlements and land use growth dynamics simulation models, the dynamic analysis of road and conventional and high speed railway network traffic, the implementation of public administration corporate GIS that integrate, among other subjects, digital cartography, tax management systems, urban planning and zoning, and the implementation of special projects and territorial studies. Some of our clients are the Planning Department of the autonomous government of Generalitat de Catalunya and Xunta de Galicia, the Barcelona Territorial Metropolitan Plan of Generalitat de Catalunya, the regional government of Consell Comarcal d Osona, and the local governments of the cities of Ourense, Lleida, Reus, Vic, Tortosa, Tarragona, and El Prat de Llobregat, etc.