Trendy i problemy rozwoju systemów i zastosowań geoinformacji w samorządzie terytorialnym

The paper presents major trends recently observed in the area of development of the GIS technology and applications of geoinformation (GI) in local Polish administration. The paper also discusses obstacles to these developments. In the beginning, the paper discusses overall importance of GI in land management by local administration. Against this background, directions of GIS development and current applications of GI in Poland and in the world are presented. The authors suggest that the following four interlinked trends are most important: m Moving from isolated geoinformation .islands. raising problems in access to GI to local government GI infrastructure providing unrestrained access to the whole GI necessary for local society and administration. m Strategy for moving from GI islands to GI infrastructure usually involves introduction of standards (e.g. XML/GML) and technology and components (e.g. data warehouses) integrating existing GIS systems and databases. m Traditional specialist GIS technology is replaced by modern IT based on Internet, Web Services, object-oriented methodologies and standard tools for development of IT applications plus tools for GI processing. m The most visible and popular manifestation of current changes involves development of .WebGIS . represented by Geoportals often integrated with data warehouses and metadata catalogues replacing traditional desktop GIS in many application areas. The final part of the paper discusses development directions of practical implementations of GI involving systems providing GI access and processing for public administration and for the society and business. It is unfortunate that these developments are faced by many problems. The most critical of them involves obstacles in access to GI administered by geodetic public service. These obstacles include, between others, extremely high prices for GI data and application of discretionary procedures for making data available or rather unavailable. We can see how harmful this policy could be not only for local administration but also for other GI users on the examples of implementation of .WebGIS. technology and Geoportals for the needs of business and the society in general. In this area of GI applications one can notice a clear trend of moving away from the use of geodetic data as the reference layer of Geoportals in the result of the above mentioned problems. This trend is particularly visible in many recent tenders for various Portals and Geoportals for the local government. The tender organizers frequently require the tenderers to provide maps and other forms of GI for the Geoportal instead of providing them themselves from the official geodetic centres. This results more and more often in low quality data from doubtful sources and in difficulties in data maintenance. Such a situation raises many other problems adversely affecting development of GI applications in Poland. In the authors. opinion only resolute legislative initiatives regarding development of GI infrastructure in Poland, and specifically conditions for implementation of the EU Directives on INSPIRE and Re-use of PSI may facilitate development of national spatial information infrastructure in Poland.