spatial information opportunities for government

SPATIAL SCIENCE Vol. 51, No. 1, June 200679

Spatial InformationOpportunities for Government

J. Wallace

I. P. Williamson

A. Rajabifard

R. Bennett

Land administration systems (LAS) are now challengedby new technologies and radically different demandsfor land information for modern governments. Spatialinformation is good enough to support spatialidentification and location enablement applicationsavailable in every significant type of software (wordprocessing, spread sheets, professional applications,Web systems, GIS and databases). A place on earth canbe defined with precision on the ground and incomputers. Digital data can be attached to a location asnever before. With appropriate computer facilitiesand the underpinning interpretative information layerswhich translate computer language into understandabledescriptions of places, governments can potentially

identify ‘where’ their policies are happening. Anation’s ability to reap the benefits of the spatialenablement of information requires the highest levelinput from its government and private sectors.

These challenges are discussed in the context ofdeveloping a vision of iLand, a concept of spatiallyenabled information for modern government. Thisarticle sets this vision in the history of landadministration, and the growing reliance on a new kindof information about land and its attributes that isrelative and aspatial in regulation of activities andtaxation.

J. WallaceI. P. WilliamsonA. RajabifardR. BennettCentre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and LandAdministrationDepartment of Geomatics, The University of Melbourne,http://www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/people/[email protected]

INTRODUCTION

New technologies available in land administrationsystems offer significant opportunities to modernindustrialised democracies. These opportunities areexplored in a vision for land information called iLandwhich focuses on spatial enablement of government.The vision is primarily to assist design andimplementation of governments’ information policies,particularly in relation to land information,anticipating public and private needs. It is part of alarge project that explores the issues generated bydelivery of sustainable development, rapidly changing

Vol. 51, No. 1, June 2006 SPATIAL SCIENCE80

technology, new property markets, mutatinggovernment systems and Australian inventiveness inuse of spatial information. The question addressed is –

How can Australia’s land administration systems(LAS) be adapted to capture the efficiencies availablefrom new technologies and to provide essentialinformation needed by modern government?

The vision builds on theoretical approaches familiarin law, public administration and economics, butprincipally relies on the discipline of engineering,where hard questions receive designed, constructedand managed solutions. Impediments to implementationof the vision are not considered at this stage. iLand isoffered as a vision in which computerised informationgenerated by LAS is spatially identified and much moreuseful, ignoring traditional boundaries betweennational and state administrations. Building a vision,then comparing its components against reality to identifybetterment paths, are well tested and successful methodsof achieving international congruity and understandingabout LAS. The processes involved are especially usefulin a nation of federated states long used to doing thingsto suit local administrative, not national, needs. TheFIG Statement on Cadastre (FIG, 1995) and Cadastre2014 (Kaufman and Steudler, 1999) were highlyinfluential because these models were far-sighted andcleverly articulated. The spectacular growth in interestin spatial data or information infrastructures (SDIs)also illustrates the utility of designing a robust visionto harmonise innovative solutions to national problems(Williamson et al., 2003).

The article briefly explains land administrationhistory and the key tools of spatial information and thecadastre. The dramatic changes in the information needsof modern governments, particularly in taxation, areexplored and placed within land administrationfunctions. Engagement of the Australian government isidentified as an inevitability. Finally, a vision forspatially enabling governments is articulated. The keyidea is to build on eLand where government putsinformation in digital form, makes it accessible on theWeb, and incorporates small scale reengineering ofservices, to create iLand, where all major governmentinformation systems are spatially enabled, and where

location and spatial information are regarded as commongoods made available to citizens and businesses toencourage creativity and product development. In short,the vision relies on educating policy makers about thepower of spatial information.

AUSTRALIAN LANDADMINISTRATION

Land administration systems started in Europe becausegovernments needed coherent and fair tax collectionsystems, then they developed to service land markets.Their basic functions are to organise land tenures,values, uses and development. Their primary tools aresurveying, registration systems and databases run bygovernment organisations. The importance of landadministration increased after 1990, when systems inmodern democracies emerged from their technical focusto engage professionals from the disciplines ofengineering, economics, political and social sciences,law and computer technology, to address sustainabledevelopment issues. Simultaneously, internationalorganisations and national governments in less developedcountries struggled to adapt LAS to deliver land and foodsecurity and to build land markets.

The land management paradigm for landadministration (Figure 1), grew out of these efforts.This integrated model was developed (Enemark et al.,2005) to assist governments to understand modernland administration and to facilitate sharing amongnations at various stages of development. Theorganisation of land tenure, land value, landdevelopment and land use within the local institutionalcontext is shown within the overriding policy ofsustainable development.

The Australian context

iLand is far from implementation by any moderngovernment. Moreover, no land administration systemis yet able to provide competent support for the newcomplex property market that has developed especiallysince the 1970’s (Wallace and Williamson, 2005).Australia’s federal system is, from the viewpoint ofland administration efficiency, characterised by an


Figure 1. Global land management paradigm (Enemarket al., 2005)

additional problem: an outmoded constitution withdistribution of powers ill designed for moderncircumstances. Ideally, a national government shouldorganise the basic standards for capture of detailedspatial information about land, buildings, environment,and so on, so that the information base is nationallycohesive and sufficient for devising and implementingnational monetary policy and sustainability.Constitutionally, Australia’s national governmentcannot do this directly. Most of the information abouttopography and land parcels is held by states, some bylocal governments, and some (indeed very important)not by any governments, or even in any organisedsystem, at all (risk and emergency information). Whilethe Australian government undertook the front runningin national mapping, marine information, and sometopographic information, it is hardly conscious ofcadastral information. Meanwhile, federal departmentsand specialist agencies are engaged in collecting landinformation relevant to their administrative functions,with the key agency being GeoScience Australia, thenational agency for geoscience research and geospatialinformation within the Department of Industry,Tourism and Resources ( http://www.ga.gov.au). Othersignificant players are the Australian Bureau ofStatistics (ABS), Department of Transportation and

Regional Affairs (DoTAR), Department of Agriculture,Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), National Oceans Office(NOO), and the Commonwealth Scientific and IndustrialResearch Organisation (CSIRO). The Department ofDefence is a primary user of spatial information, andfor reasons of security, their information resourcesare not available to the public or business or indeedany other government agencies.

These agencies, and the state and territory agenciesin LAS shown in Figure 2 , are independent. The Officeof Spatial Data Management (OSDM) coordinates spatialdata access and pricing in the Australian governmentand fosters private sector activities. Successful relatedcross boundary initiatives include the AustralianSpatial Council (ANZLIC), Public Sector MappingAgency (PSMA), Intergovernment Committee on Surveyand Mapping (ICSM) and National Land and Water Audit(NLWA); these depend on cooperation, not power.

Under the Constitution, usually states or localgovernments hold land information. Without a worldwar, transfer and cooperation are slow (Warnest etal., 2002), but have achieved notable successes. PSMAprovides national seamless datasets on coastlines, roads,railways, water, national parks, Cadlite (including the


cadastre), points of interest, administrative boundariesand addresses; the Australian Collaborative Land UseMapping Program (ACLUMP) in NLWA is available forrural, not urban areas; the Department of Environmentand Heritage produced Australia’s first Triple BottomLine Report (2003-2004) (Australian Departmentof Heritage and Environment, 2004): Our EnvironmentSocial and Economic Performance, and GeoScienceAustralia builds overall coherence in national geospatialinformation.

Despite Australia’s embedded silo systems ofinformation about land, and people to land relationships,dramatic improvements in organisation of spatialinformation occurred after 1990, the most well knownproduct being the national geo-coded address file(GNAF), compiled by PSMA using data from theAustralian Electoral Commission, Australia Post, andstates and territories. The ABS initiative of mesh blockscreated the first opportunity for geographicallyreferenced statistics, and allows information about afarm, factory, house or business to be assigned to itscorrect mesh block through its street address (ABS,2005). Australia’s 350,000 mesh blocks will becomethe basis for spatially organising all political,statistical and administrative geographical information,though few understand the implications of the newdesign. Though spatial awareness had increased rapidly,

Figure 2. Australian land information management agencies(Warnest et al., 2002)

more needed to be done. ANZLIC, in early 2005,therefore proposed a new socio-economic and emergingissues strategic committee to support wider adoptionand use of spatial information in non-traditionalcommunities of practice.

State, territory and local governments. Thefederated states and territories manage the land andland information within their boundaries. They followthe historical models of separate treatment of each ofthe core land administration functions. Land valuation,land tenures, land uses and land development are dealtwith in silos, each with their particular database andadministrative organisation. Day-to-day assignmentand management of planning zones and buildings,including much of the heritage work, are handled byover 700 local governments. These agencies collectland information in ways to suit their internalmanagement, not immediate users, let alone emergingusers.

Spatial enablement

Spatial enablement of information offers solutions tootherwise intractable problems about organisinginformation and permits more equitable and effectiveadministration of land and resources. Spatial


information is diverse. It includes position, time,distance, measurements and relationships of a person,place or thing, typically held in a geographic informationsystem (GIS) but also in any system that understandsthe world in geospatial terms. Spatial information isbased on coordinates (longitude and latitude, or X and Y,and height, Z,) and allows positional functions of digitalsystems to track a place on earth’s surface,measurements, and relations (notably times anddistances). Popularity of GIS jumped by orders ofmagnitude as capacity to handle map and geographicinformation production, shrinking and enlargement,overlaying and access, improved. Land informationheld in computers now stands to be revolutionalised bylocation or spatial enablement: the capacity of software(usually a database or a GIS) to identify the position ofan item in relation to other items and in relation to itsposition on the earth. Thus location enablement allowsdatabases and other computer applications tographically identify places and positions of items andprocesses and, increasingly, to provide useful detailsabout characteristics. Imagine tracking internationalparcel deliveries, or managing international airports.

Integration is the current theme of spatial enablementwhich, at its best, could combine cadastral informationabout individual properties (or parcels, technically)and information about attributes of land. Once thiscombination is conceived, the land administrator candeliver policy and planning utility by merging, say,land parcels and properties information, and land usetypes in council planning schemes. Or by automaticallyand graphically combining survey defined propertypolygons with general attributes such as land use,owners, interests, land cover, boundaries, calculatedarea, tenure, lot/plan, reserve, suburb, postcode, rateregistration number, account number, building permitnumber, and so on. The information can be presented asimages or pictures, without losing the analyticalcapacity of relational databases.

The high take-up of spatial information technologyby organisations seeking better land managementopportunities is well known. The growth was sospectacular that an entire new concept was designed tomanage and coordinate the explosion. The spatial datainfrastructure, SDI, was born and became a world widephenomenon. (Groot and Mclaughlin, 2000, Van

Orshoven et al., 2003; Williamson et al., 2003,Masser, 2005). While spatial information is visiblein many Web applications, equivalent improvementsin LAS have proved to be much more illusive.

Central role of the cadastre

Digital information about land is central to the policyframework of modern land administration. In iLand,digital position information is going to be even morecentral to government. The cadastre, or the land useand parcel map, is the vital information layer of anintegrated land management system and, in future, itwill underpin information systems of moderngovernments. The role of a digital cadastral data base(DCDB) reflects careful collection of informationthrough survey methodologies. The parcel orientationof the DCDB allows ordinary users to confidentlyidentify land. Thus the DCDB is the core layer for bothhistorical and practical reasons, particularly becauseit is built by surveyors who use rigorous methods tomeasure and mark the earth.

While some developed countries do without a formalcadastre, all generate digital maps of land allocationpatterns, uses and lay-outs, and they keep sophisticatedparcel maps showing roads, land lay-out, and evenaddresses and photographs. Without these digitalfacilities, modern governments cannot understand thebuilt environment of cities, manage land competently,utilise computer capacity to assist policy making, orretrieve value out of land. The characteristics of thecadastre are the large scales of its data (typically 1:500- 1:1000 in urban areas with 1:2000 - 1:10000 inrural areas) covering very small areas of land, such asstreet blocks or local government areas, and theseamless horizontal or two dimensional merger of theareas by the computer to reflect urban and rural landuses of a country. Since most of the information isderived from survey practice, the software used tosupport cadastral functions is particular to digitalsurveying systems. Different software is used by GISto manage geographic information. While thisdistinction is technically significant, iLandpresupposes that the variability of survey based andGIS systems will diminish, allowing much moreinteroperability of systems and information (Elfick,2005).


Despite the importance of the cadastre (or itsequivalent), many of the pressures of moderngovernment threaten its future. DCDBs (or, indeed,reasonable standard hard copy cadastres) are expensiveto create and to maintain if their use is limited tomapping and subdivision. The opportunity to cover thecost of DCDB maintenance by attaching overheads tonew parcellations or subdivisions is limited becausethe charge per parcel is excessive and there is no reasonwhy new parcels should subsidise the security of digitalinformation pertinent to all others. Given theirconstruction costs, marketing DCDBs at prices set forcost recovery limits their use in and out of government,even though the georeferenced databases are still usedextensively. Access opportunities and charges arequestions that an information vision must eventuallyaddress. In iLand, the DCDB is destined for a muchbroader role as fundamental government infrastructureequivalent to a major highway or railway, though itwas originally created on behalf of taxpayers merelyfor better internal administration. Ideally, taxpayersand businesses (especially the utility providers) shouldaccess the DCDB free, or at least available for veryaffordable charges and through convenient informationexchange arrangements (Onsrud et al., 2004;Committee on Licensing Geographic Data and Services,2004). The greatest potential for the DCDB is withinthe land information industry at large, as the principalmeans of translating the scientific X, Y and Z coordinatesinto meaningful descriptions of places, facilitatingunderstanding of precise locations of government,business and community policies, regulations andactions.

INFORMATION NEEDS OFMODERN GOVERNMENTS

Multi use, interoperability and the landinformation interchange

In old technologies, land information was tabular:data sets of numerical identifiers for parcels, and namesof owners in alpha numeric files. Australia had multiplesystems. For instance, multiple sets of owner/parcelfiles existed in Victoria alone in the 1980’s. The land

registry held the authoritative owner parcelinformation, but no other agency could use title data.To be fair, the information was not digitised in a formsuitable for uses beyond the registry. Otherjurisdictions had similar issues of duplication,incompleteness and incompatibility of data sets. Evenwithout the privacy rules, land registry data wouldlanguish in registry computers unless a significantpolicy shift was made. The beginnings of such a shiftare evident in the take up of Web opportunities.

Computerisation significantly improved and extendedopportunities for land registries particularly as focusshifted from collection of information withingovernment agencies for their internal purposes tomaking information work for the combined purposes ofthe primary agency, other jurisdictional agencies,across and among governments and even in the privatesector. Much of the effort in organising landinformation, especially in spatial form, nowconcentrates on multi-use and mechanisms ofinteroperability. The transition from the browser ( lookand see) to a true information interchange is describedin Figure 3.

Analysis of Australian web facilities in the eLandenvironment of 2005 (Kalantiri et al., 2005) showsthat the systems were used to retail certificates andinformation previously obtained in paper form.Reengineering typically required a decade or more ofconsistent input capable of surviving successiveadministrative and policy changes and was not theeLand focus (Bennett et al., 2005). Moreover, thecost of Internet systems to support eLand initiativeswas typically underestimated. A simple Internetbanking system for the Commonwealth Bank of Australiaoperative in 2005 cost $100m. Governments werenot prepared to spend anything like that on Webenablement of land administration. Initiatives ineConveyancing depended on convincing businessmodels showing reengineered data entry and processingwould save administrative overheads in addition toprivate sector savings.

These commendable initiatives suited their times.However more is needed to satisfy the needs of modern


governments. Land is now more taxed, more regulatedand more in need of sustainable management than everbefore. The iLand vision of spatially enablinggovernments aims at releasing the power of landinformation to service these emerging policy needs.

Management of land information

Spatially enabling government requires designers toappreciate the difference between data and information.Given their ever expanding capacity, computer systemsnow hold masses of data. Good government is not abouthaving data, but about having information. Appreciationof this difference is most apparent in Western Australiawhere the Department of Land Administration becamethe Department of Land Information, and where itsShared Land Information Platform (SLIP) focused onbusiness activities (Searle and Britton, 2005).Meanwhile, traditional LAS activities of state and localgovernments - land registration, valuation, planning,rates collection, stamping of transactions, land taxing– continue to generate land information that languishesin the source agencies and is not spatially enabled.Governments now collect data about land for a multitude

of purposes some of which are indicated in the Table 1.The point of Table 1 is to show how management of landinformation might change when relieved from thetechnical restrictions of source (either national orstate), scale (large scale cadastral or small scalespatial) and technology (GIS or survey based). Theidea is to demonstrate the power of integration of datasetsinherent in design for a national SDI, and eventually aseamless merger of data collected by spatial and surveyapplications. Table 1 ignores the distinction, so wellembedded by history, professional practice, technologyand administrative structures, in favour of a moreflexible approach to land information. A distinctionbetween the relative stability of the data about naturaland built features and the changeability of informationabout buildings, owners, values and controls mightindicate better business model for data management forfuture needs. Another emerging need is driven by watertrading policy: should this innovation succeed, a columnfor the water environment would be appropriate, andhydrography and associated data would take onsignificantly different functions supporting marketdistribution of water.

IT Evolution

MultipurposeCadastre

• Centraliseddatabases• Parcel based• System reform• Public participation

Land Information Networks

• Distributed databases• Jurisdiction scope• Exchange vs duplication• Government access

Property Browser

• Customised• International• Public access • Public participation

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

• Spatial data infrastructure

Land Information Interchange

• i-Land• e-Land• Spatially enabled government and public• Authentic digital registers

SDIs , Location Enabled Platforms, Web systems

Based on John McLaughlin, 2004

Figure 3. Evolution of land information processes


Natural dataset Land environment Marine environment

Datasets of natural and built features

Geodetic control network (national triangulation)

The question of whether this is maintained is now challenged by GPS technology. The balance of opinion is that it remains essential for survey integrity

Extensions of survey standards into shallow and even deeper water is standard.

In deep water environments, GPS is used.

Digital terrain models (height)

Generated by predecessor of Geoscience Australia on Australian Height Datum since 1970’s.

Bathymetry – ocean floor models

Topographical maps Typically information and images generated by environment and agricultural managers.

Not applicable

Geographic names Generated by Gazetteer, GeoScience Australia

As for land

Hydrography Water authorities Wind, tidal and current information

Land use and cover Generated by agricultural and environmental managers

Poorly collected but improving quickly

Cadastral data Generated by land registration and parcellation processes and vary among the various jurisdictions

Parcels are the basis for most marine farming and miningactivities, however information is not available because of lack of coordination among various marine administrations

Datasets of land information constructed by modern democracies

Buildings Building fabric, installations, risks Marine infrastructure, channel markings, pipelines, shoreline facilities are poorly coordinated

Land ownership Land registry records and in case of non-private land, records of land managers.

Equivalent registries deal with marine resource allocation

Land uses controls Information about parcels, properties, business activity areas

Regulatory systems are isolated and patchy

Land values Market and government values NA

EMERGING DATA NEEDS

Public restrictions on private land

An emerging issue of organising increasing regulation of land uses and activities. As yet, no single solution to organisation of this information exists.

Not yet applicable.

Responsibilities for land

A related emerging issue for organising land management across all sectors.

Not yet applicable.

“New” interests and property

Complex commodities and market based instruments

Not yet applicable.

Table 1. Spatial and land datasets in modern government


Table 1 is not definitive, though it has a pedigree.The first section of natural and built features borrowsfrom Groot and McLaughlin (2000), with the additionof marine data (Strain et al., 2005). The data sets,even together, are far from sufficient and many otherdata sets are necessary for management of land and landbased activities for sustainable development.Administrative boundaries, aerial photography andimages over time, roads by centre lines and names, andmany others exist as well as the selected illustrativespatial datasets shown in Table 1. Omission of somesets regarded in particular jurisdictions and agenciesas core activities is in the interests of brevity only.Meanwhile, Table 1 captures the forward momentumin land administration by including datasets onrestrictions and responsibilities that do not yet exist.Any data management systems of the future will need toadapt to meet data availability, access and managementdecisions. A next challenge for Australian LAS lies inthe development of a framework capable of servicingcomplex commodities (Wallace and Williamson, 2005)and market based instruments that facilitate divergentownership and management of various components ofland (water, carbon credits, biota, vegetation and othersunder construction). The greater challenge is to useiLand to adapt LAS to incorporate the new waysgovernments generate and use information about land,citizens and activities.

Changes to nature and content of landinformation

Complexity of spatial information. Even ifcorrected to an ideal accuracy, tabular informationfrom core LAS functions is no longer sufficient tosupport sustainability policy. Nor is it easy to spatiallyenable tabular data and make it visualisable in acomputer. Spatial data are not the same as integer,alphanumeric or symbolic data for a number of reasons:spatial data are scale dependent; spatial queries areinherently complex; all spatial queries, analysis andmodeling are dependent on data models which have manyand varied dimensions; and integrating spatial data withother data types is particularly difficult due to theirdifferent data structures. So, while spatial data cannow be included and manipulated in large databases, the

collection, management, manipulation, integration, use,presentation and querying of spatial data is complex.Another complication is, however, much moresignificant.

Relativity of land information. Informationin survey plans and geographic systems reflects realityand is capable of being tested against what is seen on theground. It is constantly subjected to efforts to makecomputer information verifiable by scientific methods.By contrast, for modern governments modern landinformation increasingly involves relativities inherentin complex socio/legal constructs dependent on thecognitive capacity of citizens (Wallace and Williamson,2005) and the competence of government landadministration. The relationship between theinformation inherent in these socio/legal abstractionson the one hand and the physical parcels depends onboth government land administration and democraticfunctioning. The land registry provides the frameworkinformation about people and what they do that underpinsthe legal construction of property rights, the socialmeaning of ownership of land and economicopportunities delivered to a vibrant, multi-tiered landmarket. The economic significance of the relationshipbetween a recording and the abstract socio/legalarrangements it protects is remarkable (Wallace andWilliamson, 2005). Accuracy of this kind of landinformation comes from sources other thanscientifically verifiable reality. In a Torrens system,the administrative act of recording an owner is combinedwith the announcement of its legal meaning and thecognitive response of the public. The land might bevisible, but the socio/legal realities are not.Paradoxically, the need for these constructs to besupported by accurate, complete and high integrityregisters is overpowering. No country can run asuccessful economy if its land register contains dirtydata.

Another relativity is also obvious: land informationconcerns people and their relations with spaces, areasand activities related to land. It changes rapidly and itsmeaning and significance are variable according to theperspective of viewers. While spatial enablement ofthis information to deliver the iLand vision isnecessary, the conversion must reflect inherent


variability and dependence on relationships; itssystematic administration requires great care.Information about the natural and physical environmentis not so complicated.

Content of land information. Australia’s landinformation is not yet sufficiently well organised formanagement of a modern state. There are some notablegaps. Unlike Germany, The Netherlands and Denmark,much of the information about building capacity, type,structure, age, and the permits for building constructionand renovation, is not kept in a nationally coherentfashion. Administration of building information isspread through government, semi-government agenciesand the private sector, and predominantly managed bythe 700 or so Australian local governments and privatebusinesses through planning and building approvalpowers. Information management capacities varygreatly, as people who deal regularly with owners’corporations associated with multi-occupancy buildingsalready know.

While information gaps provide a challenge, changesin the content of land information are much moresignificant. Content change occurred principally in twoprocesses: land regulation, including regulation of landmarkets, and land taxation, using land to generate publicrevenues. The iLand vision assumes that both of theseprocesses could benefit from spatial enablement ofrelative information data sets. Both involve a shifttowards land information that is relative and socio/legal in nature. Given advancement in capacity, stateand national legacy database systems might be able toservice these combinations, but the utility of usingmultiple databases is challenged by the new spatialtechnologies.

Land and resource regulation, restrictionsand responsibilities. In mid 2005, businesscompliance was estimated to absorb 8 percent ofAustralia’s GDP. Like all modern democracies, despiteefforts at deregulation and co-regulation, Australiaproduced extensive layers of laws, requirements andconditions affecting especially business activities whichdemanded high level management skills of the nation’sbureaucratic institutions. In brief, regulatory designssince World War II passed through three broad stages:

• An initial stage of legislative and regulatorydescriptive laws compromising detailedprescriptions and non-negotiable standards. Up tothe 1970’s the statute books of the variousjurisdictions fitted comfortably on libraryshelves.

• A second stage, apparent in the 1980’s and1990’s following the growth in consumerregulation and redesigned professional regulation,produced performance based, co-regulationmodels, deregulation for competitive markets,sunsetting of regulations and fashionable codes andpractice standards. Content negotiation and selfregulation were evident. Access andimplementation issues replaced enforcementissues (Ayers and Braithwaite, 1995; Godden,2005).

• The next stage of complex regulation involvedresponses to the expansion of the regulatoryenvironment with costs of compliance beingmeasured. The problem might be identified, butsolutions are far from forthcoming.

Within these general trends, increasing regulationand restrictions affecting land gave rise to large scalepolitical and institutional concerns. The first signswere apparent in the 1980’s with the South Australianreview of legislation affecting land, followed by theFiled Land INTerests (FLINT) project of the VictorianLaw Reform Commission. Recent diagnoses include aAustralian Parliament (2001) report, a WesternAustralian Legislative Council report (2004), articlesby a group of three authors: Davies et al (2001), Lyonset al (2002a; 2002b) and a survey on restrictions byANZLIC (2005). In response to these concerns, theland registries (not DCDBs) were seen as offeringopportunities for recording a vast array of governmentand public administration restrictions on land.

This is not a surprising conclusion, given the orderlyand effective Torrens system administration. However,the great success of the Torrens system is its clean andunadorned management of the Australia’s land marketsby recording private interests in land. To encumberthe parcel registry with the task of ordering, recording,and administering decisions of government agencies is


a diversion from the core registry functions. There isno persuasive reason to accord governmentadministrative restrictions indefeasibility, stateguarantee and survey precision of parcel based records.On the other hand a remarkable opportunity potentiallyexists for using parcel style information and systemscapacity in the DCDB along with spatial informationcapacity of other government agencies to deliver moretransparent and open management of some landrestrictions. The first step is development of a coherenttypology of restrictions, perhaps along the lines ofFigure 4.

A second step involved extending Torrens registrationtheory to incorporate the concept of ‘below the line’registration for administrative and other interests.Existing computer operations supporting land registriescan assist management of some information aboutrestrictions. At the minimum, below the line servicesrelying on the registry parcel based information heldin tabular database systems could incorporate additional

Restrictions and ResponsibilitiesBUILDING ACTIVITY

Building permit

Insurance for warranties

CORE LAND INFORMATION

Universal but differentialapplication

Roads and access

Address

Planning

Land Tax

Rates

BUSINESS ACTIVITY RELATED

Regulation of facilities

Protected/special sites

(cemeteries, public buildings)

Discharges

Quarantine

Disease management

PRIVATE

Body corporate

ENVIRONMENT SCHEME BASED

Water controls

Vegetation protection

Betterment schemes

NON CORENEGATIVEREGISTER

Heritage

Habitability

EMERGING

Transaction and Ownership tax liabilities

Duties, CGT, GST depreciation

Risk and emergency management

Figure 4. Typology of restrictions and responsibilities affecting land

lines of text or attributes representing someadministrative decisions. This minimum however isnot capable of managing restrictions for whichinformation is not in text form, not parcel related, andnot related to equivalent boundaries. Registryinformation is not spatially enabled, even though itrelates to surveyed parcels. Much of the informationpeople want is business activity and property (notparcel) information. Information on quality ofbuildings, fire compliance, pollution and contamination,last sale prices and so on, is also in high demand. Landrestriction information is often relative to land uses,more likely to change, huge in potential to affect landvalues, and significant for the public. Spatialenablement of restriction information by the agency ofsource or through GIS overlay in which properties areidentified, are also options. Meanwhile, the overallmanagement of restrictions and responsibilities is oneof the acknowledged challenges for LAS bothinternationally and in Australia.


Adequacy of core information to supportgovernment land policy. Australian land producesmultiple and lucrative public revenue streams and stillsupports housing, businesses and public infrastructurefor sustainable cities and farms. For example, recentstate land tax increases are well beyond growth trendsof the general economy. In New South Wales land taxreceipts of $15.246 billion were estimated to grow17.5 percent in 2005-6 to $17.91 billion. Victoria’stax was estimated to grow 11 percent in the same year.Stamp duties, council rates, goods and services taxesand capital gains taxes levied in land transactions alsoincreased beyond the consumer price index. Australiais certainly making its land work, despite the relativelydysfunctional, silo based, administration systems. Thisapparent success is, however, not the entire story.Completeness, accuracy and timeliness of landinformation is acknowledged to be inadequate formodern businesses and governments (Reserve Bank,2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c).

The most telling examples of policy making in a landinformation vacuum are found in analysis of landmarkets for land taxation systems. The most recentnotable divergence occurred when New South Walesintroduced a 2.25 percent vendor of investmentproperty stamp duty (vendor’s tax) on 1 July 2004. Ayear later, the New South Wales government deniedthat this tax affected its receipts of global buyer stampduty which fell below expectations following a downturn in the overall land market more severe in thatstate than elsewhere in Australia.

Vendors, of course, hold the key to the time they puta property on the market. If they want to avoid a vendortax, they withhold. Without some qualitative survey ofvendor behaviour, an observer would surmise thatnatural proclivities of people to act in their best interestcontributed to the downturn in the NSW propertymarket. This market was characterised as overheatedin 2004, and subject to the cooling factor of raisedinterest rates by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA)Board in late 2003 and early 2004. Information thatexisted at the time suggested that the vendor tax was acontributing factor. Ninety three percent of respondentsto the Australian Property Directions Survey in April2005 thought the vendor’s tax was having a detrimental

effect on the market. Government denials of impact,including the NSW Treasurer’s budget speech of 25May 2005, stood in contrast. However, budget figurespublicised in mid 2005 showed that stamp dutyestimates were not met, and receipts had fallen wellbelow expected returns. Shortly after, the New SouthWales government announced the tax was removed asfrom August 2005. From the perspective of good landadministration, the question is not whether the vendor’stax was right or wrong, it is the adequacy of knowledgeabout land markets before and after the RBA interestrate rises available to the New South Wales Government.The apparently robust market was, in fact, so volatilethat any negative change had much deeper influencethan policy makers anticipated. What had happened,especially since 1980, was a fundamental change inthe nature of land information needed by moderngovernments.

The Revolution in Land Information

Land regulation and taxation run counter to the trend tobuild on land information that is certain and testablebecause it relates to the physical world. They requirevoluminous and relative information sets about land,its owners, managers and users, and their activities.The information is relative because it is related to ever-changing relationships between land (parcels,properties and sites of business activities), users,managers, owners (as individuals, aggregated owners,earners of particular incomes etc), times, refined legalconcepts and relationships among them. Thisinformation generates case by case outcomes to veryimportant questions.

New information relativities are illustrated by asimplified version of capital gains tax (CGT) (Figure5). While most of the information in the decision chainis variable or relative, the constant and unchangingpart of the story is, of course, the land.

Other examples of the relative nature of informationused in the calculation of liabilities and taxpayerresponsibilities are available. Effective tax collectiondepends on basic land information about the land parceland/or the property, including ownership, land usetype, use by owner and occupier, official value, and itsactual and potential sale prices. Combinations of the


Figure 5. Relative nature of land information in CGT collection

Agency Database Purpose

Australian Taxation Office

Land transactions since 1999

To facilitate the collection of CGT and goods andservices tax (GST)

ABARE Non-arable land To facilitate land management

AustralianPrudentialRegulationAuthority

Risks and claims To better manage insurance business sector

Centrelink Land ownership To administer pension entitlements

Australian Reserve Bank

Australian property markets

Australian Property Monitors was commissioned toprovide timely and complete information about theproperty markets in major capital cities.

Australian Bureauof Statistics

House price indices Release of 3 June 05 contained price information to December quarter 2004.

Table 2. Australian land data needs

information are required both for fair calculation ofincome tax liabilities and setting sound tax policy. Landtax calculations are complicated and vary amongparticular tax schemes. Similar considerations applyin the case of goods and services taxes and asset testsinvolved in calculating entitlements to social security.The Australian government is keenly aware of its need

to manage these variables. Large scale databases andcollections of information and data matching proceduresindicated in Table 2, are proposed for national agencies.These initiatives replicate the datasets held in state andterritorial agencies, which in their turn, involvesubstantial replication of core land information.


To assist data sharing, a great deal of work is beingdone on harmonising datasets. The most significant isICSM’s Harmonised Data Framework for transfer andinteroperability of information across jurisdictions.This deals with survey information underlying theDCDB. [R]egistering authorities will be moving froma visual representation of an interest [a picture of aplan] to a numerical model of that interest with a viewto creating software which can visualise the spatialextent of that interest (Cumerford, 2005, p 774). Theissue is now to consider whether a program of spatialenablement of government information sets would bettersatisfy inter and intra government information needsthan replicated databases. The relative newness of spatialinformation technology and modelling systems builtaround them suggests that alternatives to databases werenot considered.

This is not to propose that Australian governmentsneed to build a national and spatially enabled landinformation system. It is to suggest that the hugeresources supporting these database activities mightin future be better applied to alternative solutions,such as iLand, potentially offering more durable, multi-useable, spatially enabled and interoperable national,state and local government land information. The shiftwould be from pure land information to a mixture ofperson, time, activity and quality of information withanalysis facilitated by spatial enablement of thisinformation. Figure 6 adapts ANZLIC’s analysis ofcomponents of personal and spatial information toillustrate this process. The category of personal spatialinformation is not necessarily private personalinformation capable of identifying an individual andconstrained by privacy principles, though some (nameand address of owner) would be. Much of identifyingpersonal information is nevertheless available giventhe public nature of land registries and overarchingadministration powers. While access to some categoriesof information needs to be negotiated through privacyrestrictions, much of the land information iLand seeksto manage is information about the way land is used,when it was bought, price paid and so on.

SPATIALLY ENABLINGAUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS

Spatial information infrastructure forland management

Technological opportunities significantly improvedafter 1999 with increased computer capacity,standardisation of Internet services and better GIS.iLand suggests Australia can better organise land andspatial information to enhance policy making forsustainable land management, tax equity or business-to-business ease of operation. An integrated land andspatial information policy concentrating on spatiallyenabling government is needed.

Useability and utility of land information vital togovernment and business are significantly improvedby spatially enabling information, geo-referencingsignificant core data, graphical mapping, and overlayingof details and descriptions. Spatial enablement andinteroperability of the core information layers enableshierarchical access and use (among other uses). Real-time, pin-point accuracy in land identification andmeasurement might be thought necessary; indeeddemands for land information accuracy,comprehensiveness, completeness and accessibilitythrough the hierarchy of Australian governments arefrequently voiced. However, a land information policycannot wait for national accuracy in information sets,including even the DCDB. Every nation begins transitionfrom current to new systems despite having somethingless than the ideal to work with. The savings generatedare then put into improvement of data. If it wereotherwise, we would still be using pass-books forbanking.

Public sector innovation in information policy is thekey. Technical capacity in spatial information systemsis however developing more quickly than governmentsare able to react. Given the time taken to design andinstall new systems, they are often out dated wheninitiated. This international problem is addressed byidentification of forward strategies capable of directingtake up of technology without constrainingopportunities. The European Commission proposal (SEC(2004) 980) for a directive of the European


Figure 6. New information in modern LAS

Parliament and of the council establishing aninfrastructure for spatial information in theCommunity (Infrastructure for SPatial InfoRmationin Europe (INSPIRE), or the European SDI, show howorganisation of information can set the path for reformof both services and governance. The cross-jurisdictional European approach is generated bycooperation in establishing a broad framework fordevelopment of and access to spatial information,building on the already well established DCDBs. One ofthe major efforts was articulation of a set of firstprinciples for the INSPIRE framework of spatialinformation that are worthy of consideration byAustralian governments considering iLand as apossible strategy. After adaptation to suit Australianconditions, they are:

• Collect once and use many times• Maintain at the level most appropriate• Seamlessly combine spatial data from different

sources across a study area and share it betweendifferent users and applications

• Collect spatial datasets at one level of governmentand share them among all other levels

• Ensure that spatial data essential for goodgovernance are widely available and not restrictedby excessive conditions, and

• Ensure that spatial data are available, that itsfitness for purposes is stated and the conditions ofits use are stated.


Without a land information policy aimed at capturingthe emerging capacities of spatially enabledinformation, digitising processes in Australian LAS willcontinue the trend of converting poor systems intoexpensive, local, silo, digital systems reliant ontechnological adaptation to create some degree of utilitywhere a national approach is demanded.

Implementing the spatially enabledgovernment vision - iLand

While Australia is a world leader in SDI development,national integration of land administration and of landinformation is much more restrained. Indeed if it wasnot for some detectable arguments in favour of moreuniform administration, Australian reform effortswould focus almost entirely on electronic conversionsinherent in eLand and eConveyancing initiatives.

Emerging spatial information technologies involve amuch deeper challenge to familiar patterns and practicesof land administration. Convergence of land informationand spatial information, and identification ofauthoritative registers in key administrative areas(land owners, cadastres, persons, businesses, cars,buildings) which all government and non-governmentsectors should use, are necessary. The spatialenablement of information in these authoritativeregisters is also essential.

Ideally, iLand as described in Figure 7 deliversintegrated, spatially enabled land information availableon the Web in which the DCDB is the central tooltranslating technical into accessible information.Implementation involves changes in both LAS and SDIso that the information generated is spatially enabled.

Figure 7. The iLand vision


Improvement in understanding of spatial informationand what it can and might do required basic definitionsand functionality to be restated constantly. A decadeago, misconceptions arose because GIS, GPS (GlobalPositioning system), LIS (Land Information System),RS (Remote Sensing) and AM (Automated Mapping) wereinterrelated and often mistaken for one another (Bishopet al, 2000). The technological framework is nowmuch more sophisticated. However misconceptions areeven more likely because understanding lags behindreality and claims for new technology are oftenunrealistic.A cautious advance is therefore recommended,building on familiar strategies (Bishop et al,2000) -

• Improved hierarchical sharing of landinformation, especially between the state andnational levels

• Development of authentic (or authoritative)registers of information and their spatialenablement and methods of creation homogeneityof land information

• Much more emphasis on the arrangement ofinformation to deliver inter government capacity

• Building land management capacity using landadministration processes, and

• Building on Australia’s capacity to createopportunities for government and the privatesector in using spatial information in the ICTenvironment.

Spatial information as essentialinfrastructure.

Cost of and access to information are of particularconcern. Microsoft’s virtual earth and Google Earthare demonstrators of the future. They rely on apreponderance of US material, reflecting the energeticuse of land and spatial information by a private sectorable to access government data for minimum cost (Joffe,2005). The contrast with Canada, Australia and Europeis stark. Even a small country like New Zealand, wherethinking about government support for business is muchmore open-minded, is able to make informationavailable. In Australia, the lack of funds available for

infrastructure maintenance, and policies of costrecovery imposed on agencies are holding back thespatial information industry. Where cadastral and landregistry maintenance are separated (as in Victoria)and the land registry cash cow status does not feed thecadastral maintenance program, the cadastre ispotentially compromised. The digital cadastre (or itsequivalent) is the fundamental data set in a nationalSDI and a successful land market. IniLand the cadastreis even more significant: modern land administrationdemands a cadastral infrastructure as the fundamentallayer of land information capable of supporting thoserelative information attributes so vital for landregulation and equitable taxation. Even a simple spatialenablement of land registry information by integratingG-NAF into its system would significantly improve itsfunctionality.

iLand is similar to what in OGC territory is calledthe Spatial Web. The spatial component of landinformation is the universal need in all systems ofinformation about land, whether they catalogue sheepdip sites or collect CGT. The advantages of these newcomputer tools are visualisation of information andinteroperability presupposing a workable level ofsemantic consistency. Indeed, visualisation is the mostpopular output of spatial systems, though it is far fromeasy (Bruce and Kahn, 2005). iLand goes further byidentifying location as the stable component of mostgovernment decisions and means of organisation ofcomplex relative information. Governments can use thelocation to coordinate other information that, by itsnature, changes constantly and rapidly. Informationcan be organised around the where component ofgovernment policies and day-to-day operations. Andthe where can be made understandable becausecomputers turn X,Y and Z coordinate information intoaddresses and identifiable places. While technology isnot yet at this comprehensive stage, it is clearly goingthere. Meanwhile, spatial systems are user attractiveand improving quickly. Their basic facility allowsinformation to be interrogated through viewable maps,with attribute layers available to highlight aspects ofinterest to the user, potentially including relative landinformation generated by modern governments.


CONCLUSIONS

The iLand vision is at the initial design phase; the reasonsfor developing it, its basic components, and its potentialare identified. Construction and, possiblyimplementation, phases require high level governmentinterest (Van der Molen and Welter, 2004), funding,national initiatives, and human and technical resources.Identification of government business requirements andhow they can best be satisfied by web based spatiallyenabled information sharing systems on a national scaleis required.

This next generation of interoperable networkedarchitectures and capabilities in spatially enabledgovernments needs to be built with care. Landinformation is no longer generated just by landadministration. A whole of government approach isneeded to ensure that the spatial enablement ofnetworked systems goes beyond the existing corebusinesses of LAS organisations.

How iLand is to be achieved through landadministration information layers is of course muchmore open and is related to re-engineering LAS. Thereform directions are sufficiently compelling andcomplicated as to benefit from a national forum, alongthe lines of the Australian Digital Cadastral Data BaseWorkshop of 1996 (Williamson and Fourie, 1998).The background assumptions summarised below areall worth critical evaluation by experts:

• Australia must use cooperation and persuasionamong its three tiers of government and theprivate sector (particularly banks, developersand insurers) to inspire change.

• The location or place affected by governmentdecisions and actions is the stable component ofmost significant activities. Location is potentiallythe new organising theme for governmentadministration, not just land administration.

• A LAS is much slower to react to national andtechnological innovations and pressures. Despitethis, changing needs are apparent.

• Land management requires seamlessadministration of land, land resources and marineenvironment, and now market based instruments.

Water management issues must also be included.• Land information is more complex than spatial

information about visible land; topography,surface use, roads, lot numbers, buildings,aquifers, etc. The new kind of land informationneeded by modern government involves relativelytrue and ever-changing socio/legal constructsaffecting owners, interests, rights, restrictions,risks and many other aspects. This relativeinformation can be spatially enabled in modernapplications, provided the parcel and propertylayer is well built.

• Management of restrictions on land and moderntaxation demands solutions that are interoperablerather than multiple, stand-alone databases.

• The parcel layer, or DCDB, is much moresignificant than a map; it is the means ofinterrogation by the universe of users, andalready underpins achievements in G-NAF andmesh blocks. In short, it connects the identifiedspaces with the ways we talk about them, asproperties, addresses and places of interest.

• Two fundamental tools are required for the vision;the cadastre as a DCDB and authentic registers, inparticular the land register. Both should bedigital and spatially enabled, and permitinterrogation through maps, presentation ofinformation in map and spatial formats, andlayering of information from other systems.

• Technological change by government requirescautionary and tested options. Standing well backfrom the cutting edge and waiting till standardsand best practices solidify might save IT dollars,but acceleration of change in the technical fieldsrequires deliberative decisions to off-set thetendency to build bad administrative solutionsinto digital systems.

At this stage the how path should therefore facilitatesetting information policies, not defining their contentor technical architecture. Broader sharing of propertydata and land information is essential. Propertyinformation is needed for tax assessment, social welfaresystems, provision of infrastructure (publicly andprivately built) and property management, in additionto the popularly recognised sustainable development


and emergency management. Meanwhile, informationtechnology in land administration itself is in need ofthorough going exploration as legacy systems set updecades ago confront the IT world of the future. Givenmodern computer capacities, government needs lesscomputer power than before, but it must be cleverer(Carr, 2003). Vision, leadership, communication andorganising ability are nothing without funding, clearminded views of concrete problems and actual solutions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is part of a large project calledIncorporating sustainable development objectivesinto ICT enabled land administration systems, and issupported by the International Science Linkagesprogramme established under the AustralianGovernment’s Innovation statement BackingAustralia’s Ability. It draws on the collegiate creativeefforts of staff, students and professionals engaged inand supporting the Centre for Spatial DataInfrastructures and Land Administration, Departmentof Geomatics, University of Melbourne. Any errorsand infelicities are entirely the authors.

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