Maintaining services and improving efficiency in Denmark despite challenges caused by Covid

“Activity in the real estate sector has been high in 2021, although society has been characterised by uncertainty and shutdowns. The employees at the Danish Geodata Agency (DGA) have not been hampered in their work during the shutdowns. They have worked just as efficiently as in other years, and by 2021 have registered more than 20,000 new properties whilst also maintaining our processing time thanks to new employees.”

Pia Dahl Højgaard, Director General, Danish Geodata Agency (DGA)
 
The Danish Geodata Agency (DGA) registered more than 20,000 new properties in 2021 whilst also maintaining its processing time and improving efficiency.

Even though employees were forced to work at home due to the on-going pandemic, the Agency was able to meet demand through digitisation and by hiring more coworkers.

As a result, it has registered almost the same number of properties as in the years before the pandemic. The increased demand for housing due to a strong Danish economy and general sense of optimism is reflected in the DGA’s work: When there is optimism, properties are subdivided, and when the economy stagnates, areas are transferred.

Benefits

• Continued to deliver business as usual despite challenges presented by Covid 19.
• Maintained levels of service and processing time.
• Put in place processes that enabled employees to work quickly and efficiently even from home.
• Continued to register properties in pace with demand.

Providing official geospatial data for disaster risk reduction assessment in Croatia

“Official cartography represents an indicator of statehood, while also being one of the top achievements of geodesy and cartography. The Republic of Croatia recognised this importance in realising the Croatian Topographic Map. Quality spatial data is also a basic precondition for adequate risk assessment, the development of prevention plans, and capacity building and risk response infrastructure.”

Damir Šantek, Director General, State Geodetic Administration of the Republic of Croatia

Following the establishment of an Official Topographic and Cartographic Information System (STOKIS), Croatia is now implementing multi-sensor aerial imaging for disaster risk reduction.

The EU-funded STOKIS project provides a basis for geoinformation systems of state authorities and public sector bodies. It was completed by entrusting the production of maps and spatial data to specialised private companies, whilst at the same time developing the technologies and digital ways of collecting topographic data. As a result, the focus has changed from standard representation to functionally linked spatial databases created from official geospatial information data.

The State Geodetic Administration, together with its partners – the Faculty of Geodesy, University of Zagreb, and the City of Zagreb – has signed the grant agreement for the ‘Multi-Sensor Aerial Imaging of the Republic of Croatia for Disaster Risk Reduction Assessment’ project.

Three main risks have been identified: floods, earthquakes, and open fires. The project will be completed by the end of 2023 and will deliver LiDAR scanning of the entire country which will also be used to produce a digital terrain model (DTM). The area of the City of Zagreb has been selected as a pilot area for developing a methodology for earthquake risk assessment due to the concentration of its population and economy and its location in an extremely seismically active area.

Benefits

Topographic and Cartographic Information System (STOKIS)

• Provides preconditions for initiating cartographic production of official topographic maps at 1:25,000 scale (TK25), 1:50,000 scale (TK50), 1:100,000 scale (TK100) and 1:250,000 scale (TK250).
• Reduces costs at the global and local level in physical planning, waste management, crisis management, tourism promotion, threat prevention, etc.
• Eliminates errors in reporting (i.e. to the European Commission) that can occur using informal spatial information.
  Provides future users with modern and timely access to topographic and cartographic data of different resolutions through WMS and WFS services.

Multi-sensor aerial imaging for disaster risk reduction assessment project

• Delivering aerial photogrammetric imaging of the entire Republic of Croatia.
• Providing hyperspectral and thermal imaging of the corridors of the rivers Sava, Drava, Kupa and Danube.
• Developing a methodology for earthquake risk assessment in the Zagreb City pilot area that can be applied to other major cities.
• Producing a new DTM of higher accuracy, spatial resolution, and reliability than the existing model created using classical photogrammetric techniques.
• Providing high quality and accurate spatial data as the basis for preparing disaster risk analysis - primarly earthquakes and floods.
• Delivering data to all bodies and authorities in the disaster risk system via the WEB-GIS portal.

Digital transformation of public land administration services in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

“The dedicated and successful work on the establishment of digital, accurate and up to date property registers (real estate cadastre, land cadastre and land registry), address registers and sales price registers has attracted many stakeholders. By enabling continuous activities on data integration and interoperability, these significantly contribute to secured tenure rights, an efficient and transparent property market, the European Union (EU) accession and consequently to overall economic and social development and growth.”

Željko Obradović, Director, Federal Administration for Geodetic and Real Property Affairs
 
Together with its partners, the Federal Administration for Geodetic and Real Property Affairs is playing a key role in delivering digital transformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including improving the land administration system and facilitating digital public services.

The establishment of accurate and up to date spatial data registers has attracted many stakeholders and enabled continuous activities on data integration and interoperability. Data and metadata standards, procedures, and policies are also used to promote coordination among national data.

By the end of 2021, more than 2 million land registry folios had been incorporated in the electronic land registry thanks to the systematic harmonisation of real estate data between the land registry and the cadastre. As a result of the project, funded by the World Bank, more than 57% of these folios are now based on the new cadastral survey as opposed to baseline of 30%. In addition, the digitisation of cadastral data has created the database of real estate cadastre (RECDB) which currently covers 72% of the Federation and, following the establishment of IT system used by local tax authorities and municipal staff, the Sales Price Register (SPR) data was published for public and other users with close to 65,000 individual transactions displayed publicly.

Benefits

• Provides online accessibility to all available cadastral and land registry data of the Federation.
• Establishes an up-to-date official Address database with full coverage expected by the end of 2023.
• Improves efficiency in the national land administration system through the exchange of data via web services with other governmental authorities and local government.
• Prevents duplication of data and issuing of incorrect data from unauthorised sources through the digital transformation and electronic provision of services.
• Achieves integration and interoperability of data among different institutions to enable simplification of existing services and development of new modern customer-oriented services.

Supporting sustainable land development in Albania

“About 80% of Central and Local Government decision-making directly affects the territory and having digital topographic maps helps tremendously in the planning, development and monitoring activities of many institutions in Albania.”

Lorenc Çala, General Director, State Authority for Geospatial Information

Albania’s State Authority for Geospatial Information (ASIG) has delivered a new topographic map to support sustainable land development in the Tirana-Durrës Area. Covering around about 300 km2, the 1:2 000 scale digital map was part of a major project conducted with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The training and technology transfer has increased ASIG's capabilities for photogrammetry, accuracy and quality management, as well encouraging the use of geospatial information in the infrastructural and social development of the country.

All central and local public authorities that base their activity on geospatial information, such as ASIG, the public authorities responsible for geoinformation topics, municipalities and any other central and local institution that needs to use topographic maps, are benefitting from the data.

Following the completion of the project, Geospatial Information for Sustainable Land Development in the Tirana-Durres area in Republic of Albania, ASIG has started the preparation of the 1:2 000 scale base map into the western part of Albania.

Benefits

• Supports the development of the country's infrastructure based on the general development plan of Albania.
• Contributes to the implementation of development plans, feasibility studies, detailed projects, as well as environmental protection.
• Improves sustainable development in the context of economic growth, social infrastructure and living standards.
• Helps to understand the current situation and analyse trends for: geographical features of the terrain, condition of infrastructure, condition of properties, general conditions along the coastal area and developments in urban areas.
• Helps in rapid urbanisaton of areas with irregular development due to demographic movement and rapid population growth in recent years in the Tirana-Durrës area.
• Promotes product use by government agencies, business companies and citizens.
• Provides analysis for gradual changes over time.
• Enables cartographic generalisation of maps, for example 1:5 000 and 1:10 000 scale, using the 1:2 000 scale topographic urban map.

Austrian geoportal uses FAIR principles to deliver open data

“We want to promote the further use and processing of our spatial data at both national and international level. After all, this results in a high benefit for the economy and society. This is why the BEV has created the necessary technical infrastructure with the portal data.bev.gv.at so that the data of the BEV can be used accordingly as open data.”

Wernher Hoffmann, President, Federal office of Metrology and Surveying (BEV)

Benefits

• Enhances security using the distributed cloud strategy and relieves the infrastructure from download peaks.
• Supports a common understanding of rights and obligations when using the data thanks to the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 licence which follows legal regulations.
• Increases economic efficiency by reducing duplication of effort through the mutual development of the geoportal software - common requirements are implemented once and many be adopted to varying needs of different stakeholders, which again are used by the whole community.
• Embedding of the DataCite DOI allows for a clear, transparent and sustainable addressing of datasets in an increasing data lake.

Open Maps For Europe Case Study

The Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) is using Open Maps For Europe to develop  a series of tactile maps for navigating by touch.

“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

Read full case study

Laser scanning research generates benefits for society in Finland

“Autonomous vehicles often include a large number of on-board sensors to observe the dynamic environment all around the vehicle. When practically all vehicles will be equipped with high-quality mapping sensors in the future, remarkable amounts of data could be acquired from urban, traffic and road environments on a continuous basis. If these big data can be exploited beyond the real-time processes of each car, completely new possibilities will open up in the field of dynamic modelling of the 3D road and traffic environment.”

Arvo Kokkonen, Director General, National Land Survey of Finland

National Land Survey (NLS) Finland has developed its own autonomous car within the Academy of Finland-funded Centre of Excellence of Laser Scanning Research (led by Prof. Juha Hyyppä) and started to research autonomous big data as a possible way to provide road environment data for mapping in the future.

NLS Finland built a research platform for autonomous driving, named ARVO (Autonomous Research Vehicle Observatory). ARVO is a Ford Mondeo Hybrid equipped with DataSpeed ADAS Kit allowing the car to be controlled by signals programmed from Robotics Operating System ROS. 

The car is already equipped with perception sensors, such as Velodyne VLP-128 lidar, located in the centre of the roof. Four other laser scanners, radars, sonars, GNSS-IMU navigation system and various cameras are located at the windscreen. The concept architecture for ARVO is that it can process/store all data inside the car in two ways: using post-processing scenarios and using near-real-time scenarios. 

Autonomous driving will influence societies and human life globally, altering the ways of working and living, and thus presents open questions for us all to solve.

Benefits

• Autonomous fleets will be able to carry out about 75% of the tasks related to mapping in the 2030s, increasing the resource efficiency of mapping, keeping data updated and influencing resource-wise decision-making.
• Increases the frequency of national geospatial information updates, which has an impact on enhancing decision making with real-time information gathered from the road.
• Fosters knowledge-based growth in Finland with demos for the Finnish industry using the data, and models acquired for various civil engineering applications.
• Data acquisition via autonomous vehicles significantly lowers the costs of applying 3D mapping in the smaller communities that typically have been outside the scope of 3D city modeling.
• The project allows Finland to improve the national awareness, knowledge and adaptation in this area.

Integrating government data across sectors (Denmark)

“Being in the core data business, we are committed to use our data and knowledge to support policy development. We are working to support the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement with specific national initiatives. Our new strategy considers the challenges of climate change and addresses the need to modernise public administration to keep up with the challenges. To support the major transitions happening in society, we believe that data must be interoperable and freely available for use and reuse across public authorities and sectors.”

Kristian Møller, Director General, Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency (SDFE)

The Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency (SDFE)'s commitment to deal with important societal challenges, supported by its new strategy, leads it to public sector programmes outside of the geospatial domain, while building on its geospatial “heritage".  This has resulted in a close cooperation with the energy and utility sector, and two recent examples showcase its role as data integrators across the public sector.

Supporting the Danish Climate Act on reducing carbon emission by 70% in 2030, SDFE has brought data and knowledge to the table, and through a combination of core data and sector specific data, created new instruments to deal with climate change.

In 2020 a new Utility Portal which provides easier access to utility data across Denmark, was launched in a cooperation between the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utility and the three data owners. SDFE is responsible for the operation of the portal. It will collect a number of different data about and from the utility sector. Initially, economic key figures for electricity distribution and water utility as well as technical data on energy-producing units. The portal will be extended with more data sets on the utility sector on an ongoing basis.

Benefits

• The portal will improve transparency in the utility sectors through better access to data in a common format, while at the same time facilitating the tasks of the authorities by a single access to data.
• For authorities the portal will be a significant contribution supporting their endeavor to coordinate and optimise utilities across Denmark.
• The open distribution of utility sector data will also help to create a breeding ground for innovation and new business models in both the public and private sectors.

Another recent initiative is the Building Hub, which aims to collect and disseminate data on buildings and their energy consumption in order to create a stronger basis for the implementation of energy efficiency improvements in buildings. Information on energy consumption, building construction and weather will be part of the data collected for calculations.

Benefits

• The Hub will directly support energy efficiency in society as well as in public buildings, utilization of flexible consumption and reduction of the buildings' climate footprint. The value in a socio-economic perspective is estimated up to €50 million per year.
• The citizens (building owners) get easier access to data via the hub, providing information how to make the building more efficient and what potentials the building has to offer in relation to flexible energy consumption.
• Companies can use data for targeted offers for the implementation of efficiencies for building owners, as well as better data for developing new solutions for energy efficiency and climate improvement of buildings.
• Authorities will be able to create better framework conditions for promoting energy efficiency in society in general as well as for public buildings - reducing carbon emissions

Increasing efficiency with new ways of working during Covid 19

“The Danish Geodata Agency’s (DGA) employees have been incredibly professional and have quickly adapted to the new reality of working from home. The success is based on the digital transformation in property registration that has been going on since the 1980’s and infrastructure was prepared for it.”

Pia Dahl Højgaard, Director, Danish Geodata Agency

The Danish Geodata Agency (DGA) has significantly reduced the backlog of cadastral changes to be registered, despite employees working from home as a result of Covid-19.

Due to its well-developed digital infrastructure and qualified employees, the quick and efficient transition to homeworking was completed in just one day. Resources were allocated to provide all employees with a well-functioning IT workplace in their home. Although not physically present in the office, people remain connected and continue to share knowledge through virtual meetings.

DGA has fully digitised its property registration and formation management. As a result of this transformation to full digital management, the cases and data for updating the cadaster are now fully digital and exchanged digitally between DGA’s employees, the registered land surveyors and the municipalities.

Benefits

• The case processing time has decreased from 101 days (as of January 2020) to 37 days (as of January 2021).
• The number of backlog cases waiting to be processed is significantly smaller.
• Citizens and companies experience faster processing of cadastral cases, which benefits the whole society.
• Full digital exchange of cadaster update information.
• Virtual meetings focus on joint problem-solving and knowledge sharing among employees, tremendously increasing competence.

Continuing to provide services and deliver projects throughout the Covid-19 pandemic

“The pandemic has tested our ability to respond to changing conditions. We have found new ways to maximise our activities and continue to provide services that are important to the public and to the Czech economy.”

Karel Večeře, President, Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre

The Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre (ČÚZK) has continued to provide registration and information services to the public throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Activities continued without major restrictions and problems, with progress also being made in important development projects. ČÚZK’s multi-annual plan for the systematic updating of cadastral documentation technical data with revisions and new mapping was successful. Approximately 1.5 % of cadastral areas are revised in this way every year to ensure accuracy.

The digitisation and automation of territorially-oriented projects of the public administration, in particular in the area of spatial planning and construction proceedings, also continued. One such project is delivering digital technical maps of regions (DTM).  ČÚZK is the creator of the legislative framework and of the technical specifications for all regions to ensure a uniform approach to this nationwide project. It is also administrator of the digital map portal the of public administration (DMVS) where the DTM of regions, together with cadastral maps and Orthophoto CR, will be available. Basic viewing, downloading and processing services will also be provided.

Benefits

• Uniform creation, administration and updating of information on the technical and transport infrastructure in the regions.
• Administered in single regions but shared as database information within the Czech public administration.

In accordance with the DTM and DMVS projects, an amendment to the Land Surveying Act was prepared in 2020. This only creates the basic legislative framework for them, but also regulates some principles of land surveying activities.

Benefits

• Implements EU Directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information.
• Delivers graphic data of the real estate cadastre, including indexes, as open data.
• Increases datasets available as open data in the future - the basic database of geographical data, generalised geographical data at scales of 1:50 000 and 1:250 000, high-resolution Orthophoto CR (12.5 cm) and a full range of digital raster equivalents of topographic maps.