Legal Simcity: legislative maps and semantic web supporting conflict resolution

Participative decision-making may promote the quality and the support of regulations. This also applies to regulations applying to a location. To date it has been very difficult for citizens to participate in legislative debates since this domain requires a level of expertise which is not widely available. Traditional approaches providing access to these regulations are not satisfactory to citizens since they are confronted with vast amounts of often contradicting regulations. Questions like "where will I be able to do this kind of activity" or "will this activity be allowed here" are hard to answer in traditional webbased service environments. There are many attempts to create one-stop-shop frontends to eGovernment, but these are seldom built from the perspective of the user. Developing more sophisticated visualization tools allows for a future in which legal planning is an important part of modern democracies. More accessible interfaces will mean that people can engage in a dialogue between interests, possibilities and regulative impact as a form of balanced system management rather than voting for or against a proposal set by experts. Improving the access to the legal planning process implies that legislation can become part of the democratic debate rather than the territory of experts. This article describes a number of prototypes that have been iteratively built and resulted in the Legal Atlas approach. Legal Atlas seems to provide the required supporting environment for public authorities that govern complex issues that require a participative policy- and decision-making strategy. The Legal Atlas system described here is designed to support INSPIRE environmental policy implementation. Qualified map layers and dynamic legal comparison using Simcity-like manoeuvrability can help to avoid conflict polarisation and result in conflict resolution.