Development of a soft infrastructure for city-wide land information management : a China perspective

Over the last two decades, various urban geospatial information systems were built in China. Most of them were designed to serve specific communities. Many systems just followed the wave of the so called digital city or e-government without a clear vision, leading to not being fully utilized. Nowadays the focus on geospatial information systems is increasingly shifting to the challenges associated with integrating these systems, building what has come to be called city-wide land information management system (LIMS). The existing problems China is facing are the lack of a LIMS vision and institutional framework to support the vision, resulting in the duplication of data collection, information out of date, inaccessible and limited sharing of data. Based on the current developments in the area of geospatial information systems in great China and the world good practices, we propose that the vision to build the LIMS for a city is to develop an infrastructure that allows spatial data to be available and accessible to authorized public, government department and individuals and promote proper use of integrated spatial data for effective decision-making process, and development of information economy and spatially enabled society. With this vision there are several key elements: core spatial data, availability and accessibility, infrastructure, spatially enabled society and information economy. This paper discusses the soft infrastructure for building an efficient LIMS, i.e., institutional framework and management arrangement.