Local Spatial Data Infrastructures for Medium Sized Developing Cities in China, Taking Xuzhou as an Example

Recent years, more and more cities have planned to build “digital city”. In which the city information and its services is the core of urban plan, construction and management. of all the city informations, the spatial information plays an important role, compared with the other informations,there are some specialities in the urban spatial information, such as large scale, high resolving power,bulky,been changed quickly, hard to access and renew. The value-added and benefits of urban spatial information is lower or minus. How to use the urban spatial data efficiently is an important issue. In our opinion, The SDI at city level, namely LSDI(Local Spatial Data Infrastructures) should be put forth as soon as possible, in which something is necessary to do, such as establishing the standards to instruct the construction of LSDI,Initiating the primary research on LSDI, developing and advancing the applications and services on LSDI. The city of Xuzhou, the center city of the Huai-hai economic region, also the locomotive city of the third city zone of Jiangsu province, is a developing city compared with the cities in the south of Jiangsu, a Medium sized city according to its scale and population. In our country, most cities have the same status of Xuzhou; the paper takes Xuzhou as an example to represent the LSDI, which is realistic and useful for other cities. In the paper, the functions and importance of LSDI is discussed, the shortage for Xuzhou to construct LSDI is analysed, based on the demands and present conditions of “Digital xuzhou”. Several policies are put forward to instruct the building of LSDI. * Corresponding author, E-mail: [email protected], Tel: 86516-3995708 1. CURRENT STATUS AND PROBLEMS 1.1 Lag behind the Most Developed Cities The building of LSDI is a costly project, which needs not only funds but also policies, technologies, skilled personnel, times, etc. Compared with the developed cities, large investments to LSDI are not feasible due to a lower municipal budget in developing cities such as Xuzhou. Moreover, there is a even lower demand for the applications and services of LSDI, which results in a gap to the developed cities, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. Xuzhou is much larger than most developed cities in population and area, is rapidly expanding and hence is very anxious to adopt any technologies which promise to make the management of the city more effective and efficient. But the large-scale digital urban base maps is absence or with a low quality, which is not available for the urban management, decision making and planning. The LSDI encompasses policies, fundamental data sets, technical standards, access network (technologies),and human resources (including users, providers, and value adding sectors) necessary for the effective collection, management, access, delivery, and utilization of spatial data for different administrative aims. The design and implementation of the LSDI is not only a matter of technology but also one of designing institutions, the legislative and regulatory frameworks and acquiring new types of skills. However, it is deficient in the institutional environment of Xuzhou to allow the adoption of GIS or LSDI compared with the developed cities. 1.2 Have a not So Bad Foundation Some bureaus of Xuzhou have already constructed some GIS projects, which still in use now. Through the projects, rich experience accumulated, skilled personnel brought up, which laid a solid foundation for the construction of LSDI of Xuzhou. The Bureau of Urban Planning of xuzhou Municipality developed a urban planning information system using Arc /Info in 1994,the scale of the digital map is 1:500 and 1:1000. Since 1997, the Bureau of Water Resources of Xuzhou Municipality has developed a resources supervision GIS project, the digital map with a scale of 1:50,000. Since September, 2000 the corp of water supply of Xuzhou has invested more than 1,000,000 Yuan to setup the water Pipelines Information System based on GIS, with Spatial Decision Support function and comprehensive analysis capability supported by Expert System. The system is established by combining overall surveying and mapping with supervision and database building, combining overall general survey with completion survey and combining planning approval with current information. The Land and Resources Bureau of xuzhou prepared the construction of land information system in 1995, launched since june,1998,till now ,has invested more than 20,000,000 ISPRS Workshop on Service and Application of Spatial Data Infrastructure, XXXVI(4/W6), Oct.14-16, Hangzhou, China 162 Yuan, resulting in the Establishment of Urban and Rural Integrative cadastral information management +OA(Office Autoimmunization) system with a map scale of 1:500, which was awarded a gold medal in the 10th symposium of CCGIS. 1.3 Show a Promising Prospect Though the gap of LSDI to the developed cities, a positive sign is that there is an increasing awareness among the government and relative bureaus, showing a warm spirits to embrace GIS and LSDI. Xuzhou is making a long-term project build the LSDI and make full use of it. The investments in the development of digital spatial data sets are augmented year by year. In order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of this project, the standards and policies have been established and perfected. At the same time, the land GIS has been setup which acts as an example of other Projects based on LSDI. In 2004,the DOM and DLG of xuzhou urban area was built by the Geomatics Center of jiangsu, the map no. is S(2004)046 and S(2004)094.more spatial data sets will be built in the nearly future, which could be the frame of LSDI of xuzhou. In recent years, Xuzhou has paid a great attention to technological accumulation and innovation, on one hand, Xuzhou has actively pushed forward the construction of fundamental geographic information database, on the other hand, strengthened the value-added application development.