Access Control for Urban Planning
Enabling user and role defined access to KomMonitor
The KomMonitor system enables multidisciplinary urban planning by making a broad range of local data accessible and usable within a common infrastructure. Two cities from the Ruhr area (Essen and Mühlheim) collaborated with geoscientists and real estate economists from Bochum to develop this integrated monitoring system in the KomMonitor research project. The system compiles data from different areas and enables analyses and forecasts for urban development.
As part of two projects, 52°North supported Recklinghausen county in adapting the KomMonitor system to its specific needs. This involved data loading mechanisms as well as access control enablement.
Based on the existing service-oriented KomMonitor architecture, we created a new, generic and configurable import component that enables any data source import into KomMonitor data management. Our team implemented a WFS connection as a first step. The import component consumes the source file, including its source structure, converts it internally to the structure required by KomMonitor and sends it to KomMonitor’s existing Data Management REST API. Depending on the resource type, the component must observe specific schematic elements (e.g., user/role concept). The conversion process is configurable and enables mapping from a source schema to the KomMonitor target schema.
In a second step, our team developed and implemented a user and role concept. It is now possible to regulate access to various resource types within KomMonitor and to certain KomMonitor web client portal functions according to user and role attributes. We relied on KeyCloak and OpenID Connect technologies for this implementation.
Partner
Hochschule Bochum, Germany