Current Versions
Accessing Planning Information
When deliberating and making urban development decisions in a world in which authority and influence are distributed, it is essential to be able to access information from many sources. These sources include formal and informal models of how the world works, forecasts, plans, and regulations. Two questions immediately arise;
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How do we locate this information?
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How do we recognize its relevance?
One approach to these questions is to identify the structure of the information and encode the data in this structure, so that they can be retrieved easily. This is the intent of developing a Planning Data Model. A Planning Markup Language for specifying information in this data model is also being developed to share such information over the web. To be useful a data framework for a planning support system should be able to represent them in a consistent set of categories. It is still possible to have multiple representations of the same information for the different interpretations.
Developing such a data model will require concerted, long-term effort by many active users who will generate ideas and test them. This website describes an initial version of such a data model for urban development planning. UML notation is used to describe the data model through out the website. The process of development of the data model will replicate GML to a large extent and will use some of the elements of GML to avoid recreation. For XML specification see W3C website.
Digital Design & Rehearsal Studio
Dept.of Urban & Regional Planning