The Directorate General for Environment (DG ENV) of the European Commission receives formal complaints related to any part of the EU territory (about 800 complaints were handled in 1999).

These requests may come from citizens (as complaints or petitions), or from questions raised in the European Parliament.

An incoming request is registered- once registered it is a statutory requirement to process it: the request is allocated to an appropriate DG ENV desk officer who determines the geographic location to which the complaint refers, and will cross-reference in order to identify whether any Natura2000 sites and/or LIFE projects correspond to the same location. An element of major importance for handling a complaint is the presence or absence of a Natura2000 site and/or a LIFE project in the area.

In affirmative case, the desk officer needs to retrieve all available information about them, to evaluate the relevance of the complaint. Furthermore, the availability of information about sites and projects that are operational in the surrounding area may be of key importance to correctly handle the complaint in question.

The ability to display this information, together with the visualization of nearby locations for which a (similar) complaint has been filed, will contribute to a better understanding of the overall situation in the area in question.

Often, it is not enough to only know the location. Additional background information sometimes is essential to formulate a correct and just answer to the complaint. The following is what a desk officer might need to look up:

1. in which administrative region is the location of interest situated?
2. which (major) roads run through the area of interest?
3. how does the altitude and the slope vary?
4. where are cities or villages located and what is their population?
5. how is the land cover or the land use distribution in the area?
6. where are polluting industrial nuclei situated?
7. does the location of interest lie in an area eligible for community funding?

The aims of the use case application are:

• to localize new or existing complaints related to protected areas;
• check if a new complaint relates already to an existing complaint;
• check for nearby Natura2000 areas;
• assemble report (map, list of related complaints, information on the complaint, list of involved protected areas) as input for the decision makers.

The addressed users can be identified as European Commission DG ENV officers being involved in complaints across the European Union. The Belgian territory was used as example for this scenario.

The use case has implemented several parts of an SDI:

Content repositories made accessible trough OpenGIS WFS/WMS data services. Original data formats are ESRI shapefiles, Oracle spatial databases and TIFF/GeoTIFF raster files. Most of the OGC web services run with IONIC RedSpider Web 3.0.

A web application. The central component of the application is not a map but the complaint management (basically: localizing complaint, find nearest Natura2000 sites, cross check with other contextual data such as land cover, relate complaints, generate report). This process is managed by a workflow engine that chains a set of well know services in order to fulfill this specific task.

The user is guided throughout the process with the help of the workflow engine. Zooming, layer management, gazetteer search, functionalities, but also the possibility to add any other WMS server are provided when viewing maps The web application is build using the Java technologies: Java Server

Pages, struts Framework and use the free open source WorkSco workflow engine2. Data, Feature Types and web services for this use-case are:

• A (ficticious) complaint data base -WFS with transactions and WMS
• Nature 2000 sites - WFS Due to legal constraints at the time of the realization of this use case prototype only the centroids are available.
• Transportation features (roads, railways, waterways) - WFS
• Administrative Entities (regions; provinces, communes, NUTS regions) WFS/WMS
• Land Cover - WFS/WMS All these features can be related to the Nature-GIS data model
• Region Orthoimagery (PPNC)
• IMAGE 2000 ortrhorectified Landsat 7 imagery

One aspect related to the web mapping functionalities required to browse the maps:

• Navigation (zoom, pan, scale, etc.);
• Manage Layers, add WMS servers;
• Find a place name with the gazetteer.

Another aspect is related to the specific business case. Complaint management in this case:

• Manage a complaint feature (create, localize, relate);
• Find Nearest protected areas;
• Generate report.