Building spatial cloud-based local government services

Nowadays, administrators and practitioners want to speed up task processes, as decision-making and application periods in business life have been decreasing. As a result of this demand, accessing data clusters outdoors is now a necessity. Space and time dependency for accessing data has been reduced with the help of information technologies. Recently, a new technology called cloud computing (CC) has been developed to store and share the data under an Internet infrastructure. From a traditional viewpoint, editing, analysing and sharing spatial data have been made by way of a geographical information system (GIS). When technology developers harmonised CC and GIS, a new technological era called spatial cloud computing (SCC) or cloud GIS emerged. SCC is an efficient tool that is used for refining GIS applications and also delivering a comprehensive service for local governments. CC presents new important research eras in terms of development of GIS technology. The aim of this work was to determine the technical and practical problems in the process of moving towards SCC in Turkey and to prepare ‘would-be’ solutions for local government organisations. Some interoperability models for integrating spatial datasets were developed and tested with sample datasets.