Towards “Smart Cadastre” that Supports 3D Parcels

Abstract

Singapore Land Authority (SLA) is the government agency responsible for the cadastral survey and property title registration in Singapore. We have implemented the SVY21 cadastral survey system which adopted the “Coordinated Cadastre” concept in 2004. In 2005, Electronic Submission of cadastral survey jobs and paperless job processing was introduced. Over the last 18 years, we have embarked on various initiatives to modernise our cadastral survey system. Our challenges in maintaining the cadastral survey system are to be able to stay relevant and progress fast enough to support the needs of the industry and general public. That is why SLA is constantly looking for ways to further improve our system and one of the main thrusts moving forward is 3D cadastre. Currently, we use a few IT systems to manage the cadastral survey job submission work flow, to maintain the Digital Cadastral Database (DCDB) and to maintain parcels attribute (textual) information. Cadastral plans are submitted in raster format together with final coordinates for each land parcel in ASCII format for the purpose of DCDB. Volumetric parcels such as airspace lots, subterranean lots and strata lots have been implemented in Singapore for more than 15 years. However the airspace and subterranean lots survey plans produced are in planimetric (2D) form and submitted in raster format. Hence, there is a need to consolidate the IT systems and introduce an automated processing system based on digital data submission. Intelligent data in 3D should be submitted and captured in our GIS system. Going forward, a high level strategic plan of moving towards a “Smart Cadastre” was initiated to set the vision and goals for the improvement and development for a cadastral survey system in the next 4 years. The 3D component will be a major feature in the strategic plan. This paper describes our idea of “Smart Cadastre” and the approach to achieve the vision. The components identified to develop a cadastre system which is “smart”, that will support and incorporate 3D parcels, will be examined.