Location Enablement of e-Government

Application domain

Over the past years important efforts have been made to improve the access to and sharing of location information, e.g. through the INSPIRE Directive at European level, and the development of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at national and regional level. However, the uptake and integration of this information and the services in e-Governmental business processes remains relatively weak.

Case Study Objectives

The case study aims the set-up of a case-based and collaborative learning environment in the private company in the context of an existing internship course offered by KU Leuven. Students will apply their already acquired knowledge and skills on GIS, SDI and ICT to work in a mixed team with staff from the company to design, develop and/or test location enabled applications.

Provision of training/education CS3

The Case Study will be developed within the course “Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Internship” (15 ECTS), offered at KU Leuven. Students must have taken several other courses prior to the start of the internship. The internship itself consists of 20 working days in the company and the preparation of a detailed report.

Learning contents

Programming and testing apps using the scrum methodolgy
Integration of INSPIRE components and use of API’s
Geomajas and other Open Source environments
Team work: students work with company staff

Learning outcomes

To consolidate the theoretical knowledge and basic technical skills regarding GI and GIS development and usage.
To gain a thorough experience in designing and developing applications for making spatial data available, for decision making and e-Government.
To learn analysing and describing e-Government processes in which location information and services will be embedded.
To learn thinking from the user perspective in the design phase of such applications and in particular to learn analysing user requirements.
To exercise social skills, to develop attitudes such as flexibility, the ability to organize, to be critical as well as to be geared towards results.

Reference partners

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
Geosparc NV (Belgium)
GISIG (Italy)

Available training material

The Case Study “Location Enablement of e-Government” is implemented in the form of an Internship course. Normally, Internships run without specific ‘classic’ training. They are meant for students to apply their knowledge and skills acquired in other courses in an external company environment.
For this particular Case Study it was decided to develop 2 supporting modules for particular reasons. The first module “From INSPIRE to e-Government” aims at introducing the relationship between INSPIRE and e-Government at the beginning of the Internship, i.e. during the introductory company visit. This topic is not part of the ‘regular’ courses the student followed prior to the Internship. The second module, “Introduction to Agile development methods” was deemed necessary to introduce to the student the way software development is performed within the company in order to better understand how the company staff is working on a daily basis and to make the collaborative learning process during the Internship possible.
In other Internships other supporting materials might be necessary, depending on the practical project in which the student will cooperate. On the other hand the two developed modules might also be used in other case-based learning settings.

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