Implementation of a web services-based SDI to control and manage private ownership rights on coastal areas

It is stated in the legislation related to the management of coastal areas, particularly in the Coastal Law, that private ownership shall not be allowed in coastal areas in Turkey. However, due to deficiencies in the legislation, insufficiencies in control and enforcement, and, most importantly, lack of interoperability among institutions, it is evident that private ownership exists in coastal areas. According to the Coastal Law and the Regulation for Application of the Coastal Law, Shore Border Line (SBL) infringing sections of a real estate that remain on the coast should be annulled from the title and they should be allocated for public use. In practice, owing to the fact that institutions, which perform title annulment procedures, collect the required spatial data from the related institutions via traditional methods, it is seen that procedures are carried out quite slowly, and the process of title annulment lasts for months. Effective cooperation among many different institutions is needed in the management of coastal areas. The mechanism that will ensure this cooperation is "Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)." The SDIs are interoperability infrastructures that allow sharing of the data and services among the related institutions or parties. Service Oriented Architecture and its most common implementation method, web services, are the latest software architecture that is recommended for realizing interoperability. In this study, the legislation related to management of coastal areas in Turkey is examined and institutions, which appear in the process of title annulment of real estates, which remain on the coast by infringing the SBL, and the procedures carried out are explained. Next, a series of web services were designed and developed for an SDI implementation, and it is demonstrated that procedures which are in practice implemented quite slowly by traditional methods can be implemented in a fast and proper manner in a web services-based SDI environment. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.