Demonstrating value of cadastral information in managing natural disasters

“In addition to cartographic data, cadastral information contains other valuable data of properties such as the surfaces of each use, the state of conservation and photography, and data of the title-holders. It also provides the areas and uses of crops in agricultural parcels, which, in addition to having a greater degree of details than the Copernicus Emergencies Service, allows a better evaluation of the goods and rights affected by the natural catastrophe.”

Fernando de Aragón Amunárriz Director, General Directorate for Cadastre, Spain

Fundamental data provided by the General Directorate for Cadastre played a vital role in managing natural disasters caused by the volcanic eruption on La Palma and by rivers overflowing.

Cadastral data of the new affected areas was delivered daily and disseminated to emergency services and public administrations responsible for disaster management.

Data from the Copernicus Emergency Service was analysed and cross-checked with the cadastral database. The analysis, using QGIS tools, was carried out daily throughout the volcano eruption and advance of the lava in the case of La Palma, and during the floods.

Information was then disseminated to emergency services and public administrations responsible for disaster management. This included detailed 1:5 000 scale data of cadastral parcels, buildings and crops and information about owners, surfaces, crops and agricultural exploitations, buildings classified by uses and destinations, photography, and values of real estate.

Benefits

• Enables citizens to demonstrate the condition of their properties before they were eliminated or damaged by the natural disaster – regardless of whether they are registered in the Land Registry or not.
• Provides more information than can be obtained from the Copernicus Emergency Service as it not only visually identifies constructions and crops, but also provides many other valuable data of the affected area.
• Enables managing administrations to evaluate the damages immediately and act appropriately.
• Provides transparency in the management of natural disasters as all information is published in an accessible and user-friendly way.
• Allows both private companies and researchers to analyse and manage the territory in natural disasters, whilst ensuring only owners and public administrations can access protected data.
• Demonstrates usefulness of cadastral information that goes beyond the payment of property taxes or real estate conveyance.

Spain’s customised map app puts users in control of coverage and content

“With Mapa a la Carta (https://mapaalacarta.cnig.es/) we combine innovation and tradition. Users can create their own topographic maps and aerial photos and download for free or purchase and receive them at home with the usual quality. This project has been possible thanks to the implementation of a workflow involving different areas of the IGN, databases, and applications.”

Lorenzo Garcia Asensio Director General, National Geographic Institute, Spain

Mapa a la Carta enables maps or aerial photos to be configured by the area of interest, scale, title, subtitle, colour of the cover, and by loading or drawing geometries or pictures on top. By using IGN products as a base, users can design their own maps in minutes and receive a high-quality free digital product for free or purchase as a paper copy.

The idea was born to allow users to get a paper map centred in a certain location rather than choosing from one of 4,123 classic 1:25 000 scale sheets.

The project, developed by IGN during 2021, embraces a more flexible way of consulting geographic information using web applications and viewers, and takes advantage of the possibilities offered by new technologies.

The web application has been designed using several open source components and standard web services.

The result is an easy-to-use web application for customising and receiving maps in different formats.

Benefits

• Environmentally sustainable, instead of printing hundreds of individual map sheets, it is printed on demand.
• Free download of the map or aerial photo in digital format.
• Users always have access to the latest version of the base map as the topographic database is regularly updated.
• Promotes reuse of existing geographic information and knowledge derived from the activity of public administrations.
• Provides a good option to get a customised map for specific purposes, for example organising a route, remembering a trip, promoting a business or as a gift.

Delivering the Building Land Record in Slovenia

“The Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia, together with the Ministry for the Environment and Spatial Planning, carried out activities for interconnecting spatial planning data with cadastral data. The project eProstor (eSpatial), co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund, finalises the integration of graphic and descriptive data of the land, buildings and civil engineering buildings and the determination of the detailed actual land use of the populated areas.”

Tomaž Petek Director General, Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia

Slovenia is delivering a new Building Land Record to meet the needs of spatial planning and the implementation of land policy measures. The record will provide accurate data of built-up land, undeveloped land for building and their development stages.

Effective management of building land, which represents an important capital, requires analysis of its existing condition. To achieve this, the project to acquire data for inhabited land and its actual use was completed in April 2021.

The results are freely accessible through the national spatial information system. The next stage will see this data combined with public road and railway infrastructure data to represent the build-up land. This will become the main basis for the establishment of the Building Land Record.

Benefits

• Underpins planning of the designated use of space, spatial implementation conditions or new building land for preparing municipal spatial acts.
• Ensures an appropriate land and ownership structure and implements land policy measures for remediation.
• Provides affordable land for living and working.
• Enables management of land in the public interest.
• Enables valuation of building land.
• Provides information on the development stages and other characteristics of building land for interested investors.

Providing rapid, high-resolution data for users across Slovakia

“The open provision of very accurate Airborne Laser Scanning products has triggered a wave of innovation, accelerated research and development; the possibilities for their use seem unlimited.”

Ján Mrva President, Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre Authority of the Slovak Republic (UGKK SR)

High-resolution data collected using a rapid and highly accurate measurement method is being used by a wider range of organisations across Slovakia.

The Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre Authority is providing the Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data free of charge. The high quality and up to date products – Digital Elevation Model, Digital Surface Model and Classified Point Cloud – have brought many benefits to sectors which deal with environmental monitoring, emergency planning, archaeology, and climate change.

Benefits

• Enables the creation of geological maps for inspecting polluted areas and environmental burdens, emergency landslides and other geodynamic phenomena by the State Geological Institute.
• Enables the Mountain Rescue Service to analyse avalanche situation as well as field orientation and facilitating search work.
• Enables the observation of slope deformations, landslides, gravitational slips and monitoring of cracks and abysses due to mining activities.
• Enables hydrodynamic modelling on streams, precipitation run-
  off models of river basins and creating of flood risk maps for water management.
• Identifies and interprets new archaeological sites and facilitates research into the historical structures of the agricultural landscape.
• Detects greenery, enables analysis of brown bear hibernation sites in relation to the inclination of the relief, and mapping of potential mosquito hatcheries to protect nature.
• Enables municipalities to model solar, noise spread modelling, prepare zoning plans and orienteering maps.

Keeping Scotland’s Land Register relevant and up to date

“Mapping underpins everything we do at RoS. Having recently completed our five-year plan, we are excited to move onto the next phase of our development. Over the past year, we have replaced our 30-year-old mapping infrastructure with a digital solution which not only supports our data ambitions but will progress the delivery of our corporate objectives. This will provide a vital foundation for our continuous improvement and create opportunities to ensure a sustainable and agile future for Scotland’s land register with even greater interactivity and accessibility.”

Kenny Crawford Business Development Director, Registers of Scotland (RoS)

Registers of Scotland (RoS) is building a modern mapping platform enabling it to work with structured data, develop new strategies to deliver information from the Land Register, adapt to improvements in geospatial and location technology and quickly answer questions such as ‘Who owns Scotland’?

One of its responsibilities is to show the legal boundaries of properties on the cadastral map. Showing more than 400 years of property transactions and geospatial data, this is created from a combination of written descriptions, drawings, plans, legal presumptions, and the law of prescription (where possession of land becomes relevant) where the original intent may not always be available.

To support the cadastral map, the Land Registration etc. (Scotland) Act 2012 requires a base map providing topographic information to be used for registration.

RoS uses OS MasterMap which provides contextual information (roads, buildings, walls etc) allowing users to understand legal boundaries with topographic features on the ground. As it is updated constantly and provides a near real-time view of the topographic features, this puts RoS in the unique position of providing Land Registration data that coincides with the most recent version of the map of Scotland.

RoS is also creating innovative new ways of working to meet the increased operational demand on resource. These incorporate open standards and use open-source software and are underpinned by adoption of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM ISO19152). By developing a new Land Registration Maintenance process, it is moving away from a manual ‘compare and update’ process to a sustainable model supported by automated and optimised edit tools.

Benefits

• Builds sustainability into the land register – supporting the maintenance for the next 400 years.
• Delivers resiliency from base map updates and surveying improvements.
• Improves transparency and accessibility of mapping data.
• Enables prioritisation of manual workload to simplify and improve registration service journeys.
• Allows RoS to process over 10,000 changes per week from Ordnance Survey.
• Ensures better understanding of topographic change and its effects on the Land Register.
• Generates a rule-based model for handling spatial data change (quantification of risk).

Reducing duplication of effort whilst increasingly efficiency and transparency in Romania

"We strive to turn the constraints imposed by the pandemic into an opportunity to become more efficient, and, through what we do, we want to contribute to the re-launch of the Romanian public sector through impactful, efficient and interoperable services. At the same time, I strongly believe that our experience, as European cadastral and land management authorities, will play an important role in supporting the sustainable recovery and increasing the economic and social resilience of EU Member States."

Ildikó Rákosi-Seiwarth Director General, National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration, Romania

Reducing the negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting recovery was a key focus for National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI), Romania in 2021.

By eliminating paperwork, the Agency was able to reduce contact between employees and stakeholders whilst maintaining its levels of service and continuing to deliver new initiatives.

For example, it is minimising duplication of effort through the development of the ‘National Projects’ application which facilitates consultation for projects that produce geospatial data financed from public funds. This means overlaps in the collection of spatial data can be avoided.
The application will be available on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) portal and consists of two modules:

• The module for use by citizens for consulting the area where a project is being developed.
• The module for public authorities’ use, where data producers can upload or update the geospatial information in shape format, on a TopRo5 support, like project boundaries, as well as other information of interest related to the project on the platform.

The information related to the LAKI III project ‘Geographical Information for Environment, Climate Change and EU Integration’ have already been uploaded.

Benefits

• Reduces, with the aim of eliminating, the duplication of geospatial data collection in publicly funded projects, as well as those with European financing.
• Ensures better access to information for the public.
• Increases the transparency of land management processes.
• Ensures increased impact of social development and contributes to the increase of the quality of the public services provided by ANCPI.
• Ensures transparency in spending of public money.
• Provides a useful tool for implementing the National Resilience and Recovery Plan.

Increasing use of open spatial data in Poland through award-winning services

“The pandemic period has shown that it is impossible to function efficiently without computerisation. From the geodesy point of view, there has been an impulse to accelerate digitisation...”

Waldemar Izdebski Surveyor General of Poland, Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (GUGiK)

More people than ever before accessed Poland’s Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (GUGiK) geoportal.gov.pl service in 2021. With nearly 10 million users, the service recorded a 25% increase in visitors from 2020 and almost twice as many downloads of open spatial data (605 TB).

GUGiK’s commitment to facilitating access to official spatial data was internationally recognised by the Geospatial World Innovation Awards 2021 where it won the Spatial Data Infrastructure category for its geoportal.gov.pl. At European level, the technically innovative solutions used in geoportal.gov.pl were acknowledged by the European Commission as a ‘Good Practice Candidate’ for building one access point to dispersed data sources and making spatial data easily accessible via WMS.

To allow users to access a wide range of spatial data without any restrictions, a number of new services have been released via geoportal.gov.pl, and training sessions have been held to enable almost 5 000 employees from the Polish administration sector to benefit from the data.

Training was also provided for more than 100 people from Moldova's public administration and private sector under the Twinning project ‘Improving Spatial Data Services in the Republic of Moldova following EU standards’. The project is implemented by a consortium of Croatia, the Netherlands and Poland.

The past year has also seen a significant reduction in the volume of legal acts. Due to the amendment of the Geodetic and Cartographic Law, 14 new regulations were issued in 2021. Of the original 2,504 pages of legislation, only 567 pages remain – a reduction of almost 80%.

Benefits

• Provides a tool in geoportal.gov.pl for analysis of topographic data (BDOT10k). Additionally, GUGiK has released a QGIS plug-in enabling visualization of Topographic Objects Database (BDOT10k) and Database of General Geographical Objects (BDOO).
• Enables all geodetic documentation to be submitted in electronic form in accordance with regulations. In 2021, nearly 1.2 million technical geodetic documents were accepted.
• Facilitates data use in many websites and services (i.a. e-budownictwo.gunb.gov.pl, e-rolnik.gov.pl) through widespread popularity of integrated network services provided by GUGiK. For example KIEG (National Integration of Land Records), KIUT (National Integration of Underground Utilities), KIMP (National Integration of Local Spatial Development Plans), ULDK (Service of Location of Cadastral parcels).

• Promotes initiatives in to create innovative projects such as Korona Gór Polski 3d (kgp3d.amu.edu.pl/) or Krajowa Mapa Koron Drzew (mapadrzew.com) which were recently awarded for ‘The best use of data and services provided by Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography in 2021’.

Enabling ownership information to be visualised more easily in Northern Ireland

"I am delighted to announce the commencement of the Land and Property Services (LPS) 3D project which will see the development of a detailed 3D buildings model dataset and 3D visualiser for Northern Ireland. This important dataset will greatly improve Land and Property Service’s internal processes, including property valuation, rating and land registration. This dataset will link a range of internal datasets using geospatial identifiers and allow master data to be visualized in 3D for the first time, making visualization of ownership information in complex buildings much easier."

Jim Lennon Chief Survey Officer, Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI)

High quality data from Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) is being used to develop a 3D buildings model dataset that will enable ownership information to be visualised more easily.

OSNI high-quality data sources, such as Digital Surface Model (DSM), LiDAR, and OSNI Fusion will be used to create an automated workflow for the production 3D buildings based on the OSNI Fusion Building footprint.

The 3D Building models will be based on the City GML 3 standard and conform to LoD2, meaning that building features such as overhanging rooms, mezzanine floors and subterranean areas will be modelled.

Individual property level detail within buildings will also be modelled facilitating better representation of complex building occupation and multi-use spaces. Through use of linked data, users will be able to visualise all data pertaining to each individual property such as the address, value and ownership extent in a 3D visualiser application.

Benefits

• Saves time and costs by reducing need for site visit by valuation staff through improved use of desktop survey techniques.
• Enables a more accurate valuation as more intelligence can be retrieved about each property in a building, for example area and volumetric calculations or the properties view or orientation.
• Increases efficiency of property registration process as more effective visualisation enables caseworkers to gain an improved understanding of the parts of a building to be registered.
• Brings data together for use in a 3D environment for the first time by using linked data to collate disparate data sitting across multiple Line of Business systems.
• Allows enhanced spatial analysis, such as solar potential or property flood risk, using the 3D building models.
• Improves visualisation allowing Land and Property Service to identify areas that have poor density or buildings that are under- occupied, possibly highlighting where there is a need for public sector intervention due to market failure.
• Greatly enhances user experience as 3D becomes the norm when dealing with property data and assets.

Using the power of touch to bring tactile maps to life

“Our aim is to make all geodata from Kadaster available and accessible to everyone. For blind and visually impaired people, the best way is to create tactile maps. Open Maps For Europe provided an easy way to access official topographic data from different countries and apply the production process we have developed for The Netherlands to other parts of Europe.”

Daan Rijnberk, Kadaster

The Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) is committed to making its information easily accessible to everyone. To enable blind and visually impaired people to benefit from its data, it is developing a series of tactile maps for navigating by touch.

Challenge

Tactile maps are expensive to produce as they require special paper and ink as well as the Braille used to ‘read’ them. Whilst Kadaster wanted to improve the style and coverage it offered, it also needed to assess if there was sufficient demand to justify developing a production process, and if so, how best to apply it to other countries in Europe.

Solution

Kadaster started by creating a tactile map for The Netherlands. Users navigate the map using black ink that is raised off the special white paper after heat is applied. The symbols, such as airplanes for airports and stars for sports stadiums, are complemented by Braille descriptions of features, including town and city names.

White space is key to producing tactile maps, so content is carefully chosen to ensure the information is clear and objects can be easily identified by touch alone. Due to the amount of space needed to include Braille, feature names are abbreviated and labelled by number. The corresponding name or information is confirmed by a separate legend.

Focus groups run in association with the Bartimeus Institute for the Visually Impaired confirmed the need and demand for tactile maps, and also provided feedback on the most user-friendly style and content.

Daan Rijnberk, an intern who developed the maps under the supervision of Vincent van Altena and Tony Baving, explains: “We got very nice responses; some people said that was the best map they had tried as many of the currently available maps are drawn rather than being based on official data. We could also test different font sizes to find the best one to meet user requirements.”

Following the success of The Netherlands map, which is printed by a specialist company, Kadaster applied the production process to data for other European countries.

The launch of Open Maps For Europe enabled it to extend coverage using EuroRegionalMap as the basis for the tactile maps. The seamless 1:250 000 scale topographic harmonised open data is created using official map, geospatial and land information from 31 National Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authorities (NMCAs).

“A key benefit of Open Maps For Europe is that the downloads, as well as the data, are easy to work with,” says Daan. “We chose EuroRegionalMap because everything we had developed for The Netherlands could be automatically applied to other parts of Europe using our production process.”

“Tactile maps are now under development for all countries included in EuroRegionalMap and as a result, we will also have a complete map of Europe.”

Open Maps for Europe provides easy online access to harmonised pan-European geospatial open data from official sources.

The Open Maps For Europe project is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union. It is coordinated by EuroGeographics, the membership association for European NMCAs, in partnership with the National Geographic Institute (NGI) Belgium.

This is the first time that the datasets, created using EuroGeographics’ unique data integration process, have been easily discoverable, accessible, and released as open data. They include topographic data, a digital elevation model, imagery, a cadastral map, and a gazetteer.

Benefits

• Provides access to European maps based on official geospatial data for blind and visually impaired people.

• Demonstrates demand and need for tactile mapping.

• Reduces production costs as based on open data that is easy to access.

• Builds on user needs to ensure maps meet requirements of blind and visually impaired people.

• Enables national production process developed for The Netherlands to be automatically applied to countries included in EuroRegionalMap open data.

• Pioneers new standards for tactile mapping based on user needs.

Building a House – Lithuania’s single information system for construction

“One of the main tasks of the Centre of Registers in providing administrative services is to move them to the electronic environment, to ensure their accessibility and, thus, to encourage the population and businesses to use electronic services. In cooperation with the State Territorial Planning and Construction Inspectorate under the Ministry of Environment, a new e-service has been developed, which implements a one-stop-shop principle instead of two stops.”

Saulius Urbanavičius Director General, Centre of Registers, Lithuania.

A new e-service Building a House that ensures people can receive all services electronically has been launched in Lithuania.

As a result, activities from submitting an application to inform the public about the prepared building design proposals to registering real property in the Real Property Register can now be done through the Topography, Engineering Infrastructure, Spatial Planning and Construction E-Gateway www.planuojustatau.lt.

The new e-service was created by the State Territorial Planning and Construction Inspectorate under the Ministry of Environment together with the Centre of Registers and other partners through the implementation of the project ‘Development of Advanced Electronic Services in the Field of Construction and Public Supervision of Construction’. ‘Application to register (deregister) a real property object and rights thereto or to change the Real Property Cadastre and Register data’ is one of the complex services related to the Building a House single information system for the issue of construction documents and the state supervision of construction.

The latest technologies and additional integrations developed between the information system Infostatyba as well as registers and information systems of other institutions enabled creation of the complex, customer- oriented (population and businesses) e-service.

Activities performed by the Centre of Registers together with the State Territorial Planning and Construction Inspectorate include: the creation of an interface between the Infostatyba and Centre of Registers information systems; the development of online and web services;
the creation of a payment e-service created for customers using e-banking; and the ordering and receipt of an excerpt from the Real Property Register along with a VAT invoice for the work.

Benefits

• Ensures the convenience, efficiency and integrity of ordering and providing electronic services.
• Provides better services to collect and provide new data.
• Saves customers time and money because all services are available electronically and there is no need to go to the institutions.
• Enables customers to re-use uploaded documents and to access information stored in other state information systems quickly and easily using the interfaces.
• Improves the accessibility of public and administrative services in the field of construction.
• Promotes cooperation, coordination and mutual understanding between the institutions issuing construction documents and other authorities.