ELADIS finds a desire do develop common land applications

It is possible and also desirable to develop common land and property application, but there is also a need to consider the role of the private sector and the legal and financial implications for licensing public sector data. This was concluded during three workshops taking p...

It is possible and also desirable to develop common land and property application, but there is also a need to consider the role of the private sector and the legal and financial implications for licensing public sector data.

This was concluded during three workshops taking place in France, Italy and Great Britain under the ELADIS (European Local Administrative Data Integration Study) project work package 4. According to the ELADIS report on these workshops, they were a great success and included active participation from a variety of industry sectors. Subsequently, it has been agreed to add extra workshops in Ireland and Greece.

Prior to work package 4, the ELADIS project had identified that, for integrated local authority administration, certain base data are required, such as registers of places, people and companies. The ELADIS partners agreed that the application area for places register should be land and property. Three application areas were picked to reflect the different levels of geographical aggregation: conveyancing, local development plans and strategic development plans.

The following objectives for work package 4 were set:

- To confirm the identified application areas;
- Comparative analysis of the actual situation of the accessibility of base data in the countries under study:
-- How institutional and private users can get access to technology and standards;
-- Data availability:
- - - Amount of digital data available;
- - - Degree of electronic access;
- Analysis of common user requirements for the organisational service and technical themes;
- Definition of a practicable set of applications, suitable for design and implementation of interoperable and/or interchangeable base data.

A comparative analysis identified there was a need to consider the extension of the application area to re-build information. Despite significantly different legal regimes, there was a high degree of conformance in both user requirements and the proposed technical approach to meeting those requirements.

The requirement for base data was defined as "unique property reference numbers, geographical addresses and land parcel extents".

Finally, it was concluded that it is possible to develop common land and property applications. In addition to the expected technical points, an unsought conclusion was that there was a need to consider the role of the private sector and the legal and financial implication for licensing public sector data.