The value of a Spatial Data Infrastructure to a digital building permission

Municipal authorities process many different types of permits concerning construction and communal areas. In Finland, building inspection units get over 1.5 million customer contacts and handle over 100 000 permits per year.... [ view full abstract ]

Municipal authorities process many different types of permits concerning construction and communal areas. In Finland, building inspection units get over 1.5 million customer contacts and handle over 100 000 permits per year. Lupapiste (PermissionPoint) gathers all parties working with construction-related permits at one web address and meets the diverse needs of citizens, municipal authorities, architects and other construction business experts.

Hyvinkää is an active city in the Southern Finland that continuously innovates new ways of working to meet the needs of employees, citizens and stakeholders. One primary goal is to be a spatially enabled city that uses and also shares spatial information to make processes and services more efficient and easy-to-use, and therefore the city has determinedly developed their Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Both city’s own information systems and national systems can access all relevant spatial information from the SDI through spatial web services such as WMS and WFS. In order to ensure the 24/7 availability of the spatial web services to all users Hyvinkää started to monitor their services already in 2014. Lupapiste contains functionality that enables real time use of all spatial information of the city.   

Based on the experience in Hyvinkää Lupapiste has made building permit processes much easier and faster. No printed documents and visits to the service desk are needed. The applicant can complement his application and the building inspector can admit the permission remotely 24/7 even from another country because all documents are digitally managed in the service. Lupapiste saves time for both the applicant and the city and the use has resulted at best to 90% faster processing times.   

In the presentation we show concrete examples how Hyvinkää has enhanced the benefits of Lupapiste by providing actors all essential information from their SDI such as ground water, utilities, real estate units etc. that has to be taken account in the building permission.