Peter Willems
Team Coordinator Geoinformation - Researcher
Department of Spatial Development of the Flemish Government
Belgium

Biography
Peter Willems has been working since 1994 as a GIS-coordinator and –expert mostly in the context of decision support of spatial planning. Starting his career as a research assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, he spent most of his professional time at the Flemish Government Administration, only interrupted between 2000 and 2006 when he carried out 2 development projects concerning GIS and spatial planning in Ecuador. Currently, he acts as the geo-information coordinator of the Flemish Spatial Development Department trying to promote all aspects of GIS support of spatial policy, being geodata production and exchange, focused application building, and facilitating spatial analysis and scenario building exercises.

Abstract
An Exchange Platform Gathering and Distributing Spatial Zoning Plans in Flanders, Belgium

Since many decennia, in the Flemish Region, thousands of spatial zoning plans have been enacted by all administrative levels in compliance with territorial visions and policies spanning different legislation adaptions. However, a geographical digital survey of all these plans, which is complete, continually updated and reliable, is still lacking. Easy access to these plans nevertheless appears in various policy documents as a critical factor to substantially improve efficiency and efficacy of different kinds of public and private processes, not limited to the area of spatial planning alone. The Spatial Development Department of the Flemish Administration has set the ambition to give impetus to the digital availability of these policy instruments. Therefore, in consultation with the other administrative levels (i.e provinces and municipalities) an exchange platform has been developed which allows every participant who has the competence of establishing spatial zoning plans and regulations, to upload his own (geo)data and use those of the other participants. The geodata and documents on the platform are an indispensable support for a diverse range of processes: spatial planning processes at all levels, different kinds of permit grants, deduction of indicators for the monitoring of territorial policies, spatial analyses in reports, studies and investigation projects, all kind of public information obligations, etc.. Platform-specific guidelines and standards have been elaborated to cope with these versatile application possibilities. Uploaded geodata and documents are automatically checked for accordance with these standards, before some ETL-tools put them in the right structure to be distributed as OGC-compliant geowebservices, some specific SOAP-services, and downloadable packages. In this way the platform meets the principle of unique collection and multiple use of data. Synchronization with another platform guarantees the compliance with INSPIRE and its Flemish legal implementation. The platform is mainly set up with PostgreSQL, PostGIS and GeoServer technology. Due to the distributed concept, the involvement of many stakeholders, the diverse nature of the Flemish zoning plans, and the heterogeneity of their digital availability, this innovation comprises a high complexity. However, it is considered a very strategic investment.