spatially enabled land administration; paradigm shift in land
TRANSCRIPT
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Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2013
SPATIALLY ENABLED LAND ADMINISTRATION; PARADIGM SHIFT
IN LAND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
ABBAS RAJABIFARD, MOHSEN KALANTARI and IAN WILLIAMSON
Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia
Paper prepared for presentation at the
“ANNUAL WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY” The World Bank - Washington DC, April 8-11, 2013
Copyright 2013 by author(s). All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this
document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears
on all such copies.
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Keywords:
Spatially enabled society, volunteered geographic information , 3D property information
Abstract
The administration of land is challenged by the increasing need of clients for land information and by the
creation of new land related commodities and interests. In this space, spatial information and technologies
can change the way business and governments manage activities and solve problems in relation to land.
Much information relates to place and locations. Some of this is spatial information, but a great deal is
information that can be organised according to its impact on a place. These emerging spatial technologies
potentially expand the capacity of societies. They provide possibilities for ordering information that are
profoundly world changing. The more difficult task involves embedding new technologies into the most
conservative and fundamental processes in land information and management of the land market,
particularly, into the land registries. Regardless, the opportunities provided by emerging technologies are
driving changes in the way governments interact with their citizens, principally in initiatives to spatially
enable their processes, as well as their information .Building on the growing need for land information
and availability of spatial technologies, this paper presents two paradigm shifts in collecting and
managing land information in the context of spatially enabled land administration.
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1. Motivation and Background
Land is an ultimate resource without which life cannot be sustained. From a social point of view, land
facilitates many functions in a society, from very basic activities like obtaining food, water and making
shelters, to creating complicated infrastructures like telecommunication and power stations. From an
environmental perspective, survival of many species depends on land. From an economic standpoint, land
is the most important asset people possess; a foundation on which wealth is built.
However, the administration of land is challenged by the increasing need of clients for land information
and by the creation of new land related commodities and interests. In this space, spatial information and
technologies can change the way business and governments manage activities and solve problems in
relation to land. Much information relates to place and locations. Some of this is spatial information, but a
great deal is information that can be organised according to its impact on a place. These emerging spatial
technologies potentially expand the capacity of societies. They provide possibilities for ordering
information that are profoundly world changing. The more difficult task involves embedding new
technologies into the most conservative and fundamental processes in land information and management
of the land market, particularly, into the land registries. Regardless, the opportunities provided by
emerging technologies are driving changes in the way governments interact with their citizens, principally
in initiatives to spatially enable their processes, as well as their information . Building on the growing
need for land information and availability of spatial technologies, this paper presents two paradigm shifts
in collecting and managing land information in the context of spatially enabled land administration. First
one is AAA Land Information and second one in the need for Land and Property information in 3D.
2. AAA Land Information
The concept of AAA land information described in this paper arose from research from an Australian
Research Council Linkage Project titled “A National Infrastructure for Managing Land Information
(NIMLI)”. The project is being undertaken by the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration at The
University of Melbourne. Project partners include the land registries of the Australian states of New South
Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia, and the Public Sector Mapping Agencies of Australia Ltd
(PSMA). The research focuses on the role of land registries in underpinning macro-economic
management, housing provision, and the organization of rights, restrictions and responsibilities (RRRs)
information. The NIMLI project can be seen as another starting point for enabling a national approach for
land registries and better use of their collected information in Australia.
The project describes the needs of a modern information society that can be summarized as:
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− Having national drivers – the economy, the environment, a just society, defence, governance,
emergency response and many more
− The ability to model and manage both the natural and built environment
− The creation, recording and managing all RRRs (rights, restrictions and responsibilities) relating
to land
− Building a virtual model of any jurisdiction or country
Central to a modern information society is a spatially enabled society (SES) and spatially enabled
government (SEG) that can be described as:
− An evolving concept where location, place and other spatial information are available to
governments, citizens and businesses as a means of organising their activities and information
− Simply, SES is about managing information spatially, not managing spatial information
− Transparent or ubiquitous use of spatial information, so much so that the vast majority of users
do not know they are “spatially enabled” – and don’t care!
And with spatially enabled government being:
− A concept with the same principles as SES but applied to management and delivery of
government services - part of e-government initiatives
− Applied in a “whole of government” approach
− Vertically through all levels of government, local, county, state or provincial and federal (where
countries are federations of states)
− And meeting organisational and institutional challenges where large scale parcel level data is
managed at either local, county or state level, but needed for national scale activities and
institutions
The key to SES is the property base or, for the initiated, the cadastre. The property base connects people
to land. However a holistic approach is required to integrate the cadastre, land administration, national
geocoded address files and spatial data infrastructures. Importantly the cadastre is the core of large scale
SDIs.
As background online spatial data1 are being widely used by citizens, government and the private sector
in a variety of applications and domains such as business, navigation, properties/parcels and street
1 The term “spatial” encompasses geospatial, spatial, geographic and land data/information
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address. However public and private businesses often assume online spatial data are just maps and these
maps are accurate. They do not appreciate how and by whom this spatial data are created, collected,
maintained and updated. In the past was not been a critical issue since spatial data were generally
produced and updated by authoritative government agencies.
This landscape is dramatically changing with the introduction of crowd sourced and Volunteered
Geographic Information (VGI) whereby members of the public or wider society can collect and contribute
to the sources of much spatial data. This VGI phenomenon has enabled a wealth of free spatial
information such as street address, land parcels/properties and road networks to be created and maintained
by an untrained public at various levels of integrity and accuracy. As a result, companies (e.g. Google)
that maintain online maps, tend to use free crowd sourced spatial data instead of authoritative sources of
spatial data. Government and particularly land administration agencies such as by the Public Sector
Mapping Agencies of Australia usually produce these forms of high quality and high integrity spatial data
however they are commercially expensive, reflecting the efforts needed for their construction,
maintenance and further development.
Another way of understanding the differences between AAA land information and VGI is with the use of
the spatial data continuum from a quality and fitness for purpose perspective as shown below (Figure 1).
The continuum starts with VGI with lower quality and ends with AAA land information with the best
possible quality. The continuum also highlights the advantages and disadvantages of VGI and AAA land
information. The data in VGI is sourced from citizens and AAA land information is sourced from
government LAS, primarily land registries. In between, spatial data with different levels of quality and
integrity is created by the private sector, non-government agencies, local governments and mapping
agencies.
The continuum is informed by a set of criteria for evaluating spatial information including lineage,
positional accuracy, attribute accuracy, logical consistency, completeness, semantic accuracy, usage and
temporal quality (van Oort, 2005). Among the criteria, lineage plays a significant role in helping the
users in assessing the suitability for a particular use. Even though the spatial data quality can be
improved, understanding its fitness for use is a significant challenge for the users. As a potential solution,
a well-compiled metadata that explains lineage plays a critical role in describing its fitness for use
(Kalantari et al., 2010).
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Figure 1: Spatial Data Continuum from a fitness for purpose and quality perspective
Recognizing this changing environment of the spatial industry, we highlight the significant impact of land
administration systems (LAS) on spatial data quality and emphasize the importance of tenure, ownership,
property boundary and street address data created in these government LAS usually within land registries,
in the growing world of crowd sourced and VGI. Spatial data created in LAS is defined as AAA rated
land information that is Accurate, Assured and Authoritative. Importantly AAA land information has a
documented and legally valid audit trail that is a key to good land governance and land information
management.
Importantly land professionals (surveyors, valuers, building surveyors, planners and land administrators)
create, maintain, manage and provide access to this information as part of their routine activities. They
have key responsibilities of creating, recording, maintaining and improving AAA land information.
In order to fully understand AAA land information it is useful to remember the traditional roles of land
registries, that delivered the land administration functions of registration and parcel identification that
produced high quality and high integrity information, often guaranteed by government (AAA land
information). However land information within land registries is usually not spatially enabled, especially
nationally. The tools to spatially enable land information nationally (geocoded national address files and
national cadastral data bases) are not key tools in land registry administration. In addition owner
information in land registry data must be improved – name changes, address changes and identity
GeoTagging (Fliker, Google earth etc)
Social media
Report and fix incorrect map data
Personal interets
Systematic crowd sourcing (VGI)
Open Street Map
Registration required
Authoritative data
Produced by state and federal government
departments
Small scale
Aggregated
Less dynamic
Accurate data
Produced by local Governmnets
Medimu to large scale
Current
Dynamic
AAA data
(Authorartative, Accurate, Assured)
Large scale
Parcel based
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checking are relatively poor and need to be thoroughly upgraded on a national scale. There is no doubt
that within the traditional land registries, land information is an underutilized public asset.
A key objective for all countries and especially those that are federations of states is to awaken the land
registry “sleeping giants”. However land registry data is different from most spatial data. It is:
− Essential for land markets and the wider economy
− Legally authoritative
− Insured by government
− Spatially accurate (cadastral verification)
− Highly dynamic
− Maintenance intensive
− Large scale
− Central to the business model of the registry
− Sensitive in terms of privacy
− In high demand
These characteristics make spatial enablement and SDI involvement challenging for land registries.
In summary the business of land registries can be summarized as producing “OPIT information”, meaning
Owner, Parcel/Property, Interest and Transaction information generated by land tenure functions in land
administration systems. This information concerns attributes to a parcel/property and relates to the space
in the parcel, but it is not spatially enabled at registry levels. In most countries, including Australia, OPIT
information is AAA land information.
So what is AAA land information? It is:
− Accurate – with on-ground truthing
− Authoritative – created within a regulated legal environment
− Assured – government guaranteed
− Importantly provides an authoritative audit trail for other land information data sets and services
− Add to AAA land information the power of spatial enablement and the vision of a spatially
enabled society and government becomes a reality.
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Today in Australia many players are not getting timely access to accurate data relating to tenure, value,
planning, and development. Duplication is rife and citizen access in many cases is non-existent, partial
and not spatially enabled. Many of the important restrictions that alter use of land or impose penalties for
non-compliance with a legislated standard require diligent and frustrating enquiries. Simply AAA land
information is underutilized both in its source state and territory governments and through the vertical
tiers of governments, especially at a national level. It is an underutilized public asset.
3. Land and Property Information in 3D
People increasingly live in high density urban, often high rise and multi functional buildings. Cities
require significant infrastructure above and below the ground in unique titles and arrangements. For
instance, disputes arising from high density living in buildings with owners corporations increase as the
public bring their expectations, while living in detached houses, into the village atmosphere of projects.
Disputes among owners, owners and their corporations and owners and third parties, will increase in
numbers and complexity. So will the efforts of institutions such as courts, administrative tribunals and
informal dispute settlement centres, and bureaucracies to service them.
2D survey plans (even with stratum boundaries specified) are no longer able to represent the reality of
these inter-related titles and land uses with their complex rights, restrictions and responsibilities (Figure
2). In addition, the 3D software applications in engineering, architecture and geographic information
systems do not have the integrity demanded in land administration and property management where legal
accuracy is axiomatic.
Figure 2: High rise building and its 2D representation in a land subdivision plan
Multiple page 2D plans cannot be easily understood or visualized outside the domain of the highly
specialized professional cadastral surveyors. At the same time, 3D engineering architecture drawings do
not deliver legal authority for rights, restrictions and responsibilities in land and property registration.
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The lack of an efficient and effective three dimensional solution limits the ability of the public to
visualize and communicate 3D developments, the ability of architects, engineers and developers to
capitalize on the full potential of 3D title models; the ability of governments and developers to visualize
multi-level developments resulting in increased costs and delays; and the ability of land registries to
administer a title registration system that can accommodate these increasingly complex multi-level
developments.
The importance and urgency of finding a solution for Australian cities has brought together research
partners from the key government agencies, the national coordination bodies for these issues, experienced
private sector professionals and companies in the development of multi-level developments, and a
research team at Centre for SDIs and Land Administration, the University of Melbourne to provide a
solution as a remedy to the dominance of the 2D approaches and the lack of proper technology and
systems within the spatial industry globally.
This project aims to develop an innovative infrastructure which helps address the problem of modeling
and managing complex 3-dimensional (3D) property rights, restrictions and responsibilities (RRR) in
multi-level developments in our rapidly growing cities. This project will incorporate the third dimension
of height into the property and land information systems (Cadastre) to build an infrastructure for
managing and modeling spatial extension of these complex property RRRs. This research moves the
multiple two dimensional drawings that now identify buildings and infrastructure objects and their
separate parcels into authentic visual 3D images of the building and objects that meet the exacting legal
standards of ground surveys. Property information systems based on 2D maps have served land
administration and property management well for hundreds of years (Figure 3) based on the cadastral
concept of an inventory of property parcels in two dimensions (FIG 1995).
However, most of the developed world (including Australia) and many developing countries now give
ownership titles in buildings in three dimensions (3D) using the same 2D maps developed for traditional
broad acre development on vacant land (Williamson 2002). It is the technical, legal and administrative
problems surrounding the property rights, restrictions and responsibilities in the third dimension that are
the focus of this project.
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Figure 3: Traditional 2D cadastre - Conceptual Diagram (FIG 1995)
This project aims to deliver:
− An improved understanding of the problems and issues associated with incorporating 3D property
information into land administration systems;
− A specification of the technical, policy, legal and institutional aspects of a 3D property
information and representation system;
− A 3D data model and database management system;
− A 3D representation and registration model; and
− A prototype 3D property information and building representation system.
− A method to integrate 3D land and property information into 2D legacy systems
− A specification on policy, legal, institutional aspects of complicated management of
4. Conclusion
First the paper highlighted the significant impact of land administration systems (LAS) on spatial data
quality and emphasize the importance of tenure, ownership, property boundary and street address data,
created usually in land registries in government LAS, in the world of growing crowd sourced and VGI.
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Spatial data created in LAS is defined as AAA land information that is Accurate, Assured and
Authoritative. Importantly AAA land information has a documented and legally valid audit trail that is a
key to good land governance and information management. The paper then introduces a continuum that
starts with Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) with lower quality and ends with AAA land
information with the best possible quality. The continuum also highlights the advantages and
disadvantages of VGI and AAA land information. The data in VGI is sourced from citizens’ participation
and AAA land information is sourced from government LAS. In between, spatial data is created by the
private sector, non-government agencies, local government and mapping agencies that have different
levels of quality and integrity.
Second, the paper highlighted the need for 3D land and property information. The paper argued that
people are increasingly live in high density urban, often high rise and multi functional buildings. These
increasingly urbanized populations will predominantly live in multi-level, multipurpose, highly
engineered, high-rise developments. Cities require significant infrastructure above and below the ground.
Rapidly expanding vertical cities and their populations will experience a range of new environmental,
social and economic challenges. The paper then introduced an approach which helps address the problem
of modelling and managing complex 3D property rights, restrictions and responsibilities (RRR). The
paper incorporates the third dimension of height into the land subdivision and development process to
build an infrastructure for managing and modelling spatial extension of these complex property RRRs.
This research moved the multiple two dimensional drawings that now identify buildings and
infrastructure objects and their separate parcels into authentic visual 3D representation of the building and
objects that meet the exacting legal standards of ground surveys.
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Abbas Rajabifard is a Professor and Head of Department of Infrastructure Engineering and Director of
the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration at the University of Melbourne. He is President of the GSDI
Association and a member of Victorian Spatial Council (VSC). He was Vice Chair, Spatially Enabled
Government Working Group of the UN supported Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia
and the Pacific (PCGIAP). He has been also consulted nationally and internationally on spatial data
management, SDI, land administration and spatial enablement.
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Address: Abbas Rajabifard, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia, [email protected].
Mohsen Kalantari is a lecturer in Geomatics at the Department of Infrastructure Engineering and
Associate Director at the CSDILA. Dr. Kalantari teaches Land Administration Systems (LAS) and his
area of research involves the use of technologies in LAS and SDI. He has also worked as a technical
manager at the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE), Victoria, Australia.
Address: Mohsen Kalantari, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia , [email protected]
Ian Williamson is both a professional land surveyor and chartered engineer who is Professor of
Surveying and Land Information at the Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration,
Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia. His expertise is the
cadastre, land administration, and spatial data infrastructures.
Address: Ian Williamson, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia , [email protected]