Geoportal for spatial planning

The ministry of ecology, sustainable development, transport and housing has been developing for several year its internal SDI. This has gradually used the OGC standards.
MEDDTL is also in charge of the legislation on land planning and its application by the local governments. It has also a responsibility of instructing the building permits on behalf of the local governments that are unable to perform the tasks themselves, that concerns most of the municipalities having less than 10 000 inhabitants. France has 36000 municipalities and only 1000 of them have more than this threshold.
In view of improving the efficiency of the ministerial services in charge of the instruction of  building permits, a computed based tool is under development and will be deployed within them during year 2011 (GéoADS). The GI component enable the operator to connect the building permit request to the appropriate cadastral parcel and view  the graphical part of the applicable land planning document (PLU), the regulation that applies and the public service easement that overlap the area (SUP) (figure 1).
 
For the system to be operational, it is necessary to have the digital version of the PLU for all municipalities having such a spatial planning document and the easements (SUP) that have been adopted since the legislation enables to create them. As the spatial planning elaboration responsibility belongs to the municipalities and the easements are constraints that apply to the use of land, a national standard for both PLU and SUP has been developed under the auspices of the national council for geographic information CNIG. These are now operational and used by an every day increasing number of municipalities and governmental services.
In most regions of France, sub-national SDI are being developed and the issue of turning digital PLU and SUP is high in their agenda. The example of Pays de la Loire, a region of western part of France (figure 2) has been selected for its good practice in this area.
   

In the region Pays de la Loire the GeoPAL project is an SDI that brings together all the public authorities of the region and develop a programme to digitize the existing PLU according to a local adaptation of the CNIG standards while the ministerial services digitise the public utility easements SUP.
The other major strategic decision that has been taken relates to the implementation of a national geo-portal, composed of a geoviewer (www.geoportal.fr) (figure 3) and geo-catalogue (www.geocatalogue.fr) (figure 4) as an answer to the INSPIRE directive implementation.