QGIS for Cadastral Management

Erik Stubkjær, est@land.aau.dk


The notion of 'Cadastral Management' is taken from QGIS Project blog: Report back on the 3rd QGIS Conference in Nødebo, Denmark, August 16, 2017, more specifically the section on 'QIGS as a cadastral management platform'. ESRI similarly uses GIS for Cadastre Management.
The ambition of the following is to report on and later review the use of free and open-source software applied for Cadastral Management, primarily QGIS, PostgreSQL, and PostGIS.

Wikipedia articles on Cadastre and Land administration, and a World Bank brief may provide some background information. Generally, the domain has been related to land tenure, individual ownership of land, and mortgaging, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals target 1.4. In recent years, focus has shifted to include forms of collective ownership and moreover tax collection by local governments, cf. SDG target 17.1. The collection of cadastral information at local level has been dubbed Cadastral documentation. This is also the scope of the recent Open Geospatial Consortium standards: LandInfra and its encoding InfraGML.

The interest in applying free and open-source software for cadastral and land administration purposes is not new, cf. the publication: FLOSS in Cadastre and Land Registration - Opportunities and Risks, by Daniel Steudler, Mika-Petteri Törhönen and Gertrude Pieper, April 2010, which among others refers to the 'Open Source Cadastral and Registry (OSCAR) Tools Project', 2008 - 2011, and an analysis of FLOSS Desktop GIS products by Gertrud Pieper. The development of the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) was accompanied by the development of a Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), reflecting that the various kinds of land tenure in informal settlements demands a more flexible system for identifying and recording what compares to land rights than provided by LADM. The 2010 publication reports on the development of a STDM prototype based on open source tools. See below on the present status.

FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and FIG, the International Federation
of Surveyors, initiated and published the 2010 publication. FAO in 2012 announced a Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA) Open Source Software Project, established a website: www.flossola.org, and informs on new implementations of the SOLA software, e.g. on the 2016 World Bank Land and Poverty Conference.

A few lines of description and links refer to activities to be further investigated. At the end, references and links are provided to similar comparisons.

Social Tenure Domain Model - A pro poor land information tool.

The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) facilitated by UN-Habitat has developed a number of LandTools, which among others regard Land Administration and Information. The need of a pro poor land information tool in terms of a Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) is motivated: ‘The STDM is a ‘specialization’ of the ISO-approved LADM. ..’ ‘The concept of the Social Tenure Domain Model is to .. .. provid[e] a standard for representing ‘people – land’ relationships independent of the level of formality, legality and technical accuracy’(http://stdm.gltn.net).

STDM is built upon a platform of proven open source components including PostgreSQL, PostGIS and QGIS. QGIS implements the GDAL/OGR geospatial library which means that over 75 vector formats can be imported into or exported from the STDM database. (https://stdm.gltn.net/for-developers/)


The Cadasta Platform - QGIS Plugin

QGIS acts as an additional frontend for the Cadasta platform, allowing users to manage projects and records and import existing data into the platform. QGIS users can build, analyze and create datasets which they can then share through the Cadasta platform. The plugin also allows users to download their existing datasets from Cadasta for further robust analysis and reporting. Kartoza built this plug in for Cadasta. (http://cadasta.org/platform/)

For our partners with more GIS experience, this is an excellent tool for more advanced tasks, including: With a public API, any partner can now build a third application to perform the following tasks:
(http://cadasta.org/cadasta-platform-updates/)

LADM implementing toolkit applied in Columbia

Lorenz, Jenni, BSF Swissphoto, Switzerland, et al

In  Switzerland,  although  the  Federal  Act on Geoinformation  of  2007 is a  milestone in terms of applying the model-driven approach for the NSDI, the  law itself  was not enough to achieve the breakthrough of the modeling language INTERLIS. A freely available ecosystem of tools, which fulfills all the requested tasks of implementing the model-driven approach, is needed. 
These  tools  are  now  available  as  FOSS  solutions  and  can  be  deployed  and  further  enhanced  if required, for any actual implementation of the conceptual LADM. (Sec. 7)

All the [INTERLIS] tools are open source. However, they can be integrated in a hybrid GIS environment (FOSSGIS and proprietary solutions) without violating the open source licenses. An example of its interplay can be seen, when it comes to the documentation of the data model. The user can document all the classes  and the attributes in the UML/INTERLIS-Editor. These comments will be exported in the conceptual INTERLIS data model. Ili2pg reads these comments from the data model and writes them in the database when creating the schema and tables. The QGIS plugin – as the last tool in this chain – will show these comments in the layer properties. (Sec. 4.3)

The LADM Project Generator and Editing plugin for QGIS is a support tool to generate and edit data according to the LADM model. This means that the plugin will allow reading PostGIS data base schemas generated from any INTERLIS based LADM model, and provides the appropriate forms and data type widgets for the correct manipulation of data according to the classes, attributes, data types, relations and constraints defined in the model. (Sec. 4.2.5)
http://de.bsf-swissphoto.com/media/publikationen/2017-02_Jenni_816_WB%20Paper.pdf

Columbia project website http://www.proadmintierra.info and GitHub at https://github.com/AgenciaImplementacion

cf. also Kalogianni E., Dimopoulou E., van Oosterom P. (2017) A 3D LADM Prototype Implementation in INTERLIS.
In: Abdul-Rahman A. (eds) Advances in 3D Geoinformation. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-25691-7_8


SEC4QGIS (Spain)

Funciones relativas a la Sede Electronica del Catastro (SEC) para QGIS
Functions related to the Spanish Cadastre Electronic Headquarters (SEC) for QGIS.

The SEC4QGIS complement (SEC for QGIS) is a free tool based on free software that allows
Version 1.0.5 of Nov. 6, 2017

Plugin home page: http://sec4qgis.tk
Manual (in Spanish): https://github.com/yeahmike/sec4qgis/blob/master/help/ayuda.pdf
QGIS Python Plugins Repository: https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/SEC4QGIS/
Context: https://www.slideshare.net/CarlosAlonsoPea/smart-successful-cadastral-new-tools-for-real-estate-registration-all-in-16-digits?

Proyecto Modernización del Sector Forestal en Honduras – MOSEF

2.1 Activities carried out
The training strengthening task was developed in several stages, each well defined in terms of the final objective. The main activities consist of:
 Training in the Python programming language for all Institutions.
 Practical training for the AMHON staff in development on QGIS and use of the modules of the Municipal SIT, with direct use of the system, procedures, and to support the user's familiarity with the system.
 User assistance, providing the extension of some concepts introduced during the lessons and providing clarifications to the questions of the users.
 Classroom training for institutions handling databases other than Postgres, use of Git repositories and modules of the Municipal SIT.
http://mosef.org.hn/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Capacitacion_v1.1.pdf
http://mosef.org.hn


Generic land registry and cadastre data model .. for Turkey

Arif Cagdas Aydinoglu and Rabia Bovkir, Gebze Technical University, Dept. of Geomatics Engineering, Kocaeli, Turkey
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.07.029

Quantum GIS (QGIS) software was used mainly to visualise and edit GML-based open data sets and to connect the PostgreSQL 9.2 with the PostGIS 2.0 extension that provides a database for sharing with different users. GeoServer publishes these open data sets with OGC web map services to the users. [In general,] Open source software tools were used to test the data model for land-related applications. The Humboldt Alignment Editor (HALE) (Reitz and Templer, 2011) was utilised to produce Extract Transform Load (ETL) tools enabling data transformation between source data sets and target data schemas (Horak et al., 2011).

3liz/QgisCadastrePlugin (France)

A QGIS plugin which helps users to import the french land registry ('cadastre') data into a database. It is meant to ease the use of the data in QGIS by providing search tools and appropriate layer symbology.


Similar comparisons

The analysis of FLOSS Desktop GIS products by Gertrude Pieper Espada in Existing Open Source Tools and Possibilities for Cadastre Systems from 2010 seems not replaced by a similar throughout comparison.

The STDM is put into a participatory GIS perspective by comparing it with SOLA of FAO (cf. https://github.com/SOLA-FAO/code) and MAST of USAID: Open source and crowd sourcing tools for land administration – which way forward? Kate Fairlie and Solomon Njogu

Similarly, the Global Donor Working Group on Land commissioned a 'Scoping study on open data, innovative technology-based solutions for better land governance' http://www.donorplatform.org/publication-land-governance/scoping-study-on-open-data-innovate-technology-based-solutions-for-better-land-governance.html

A further recent review: Land Tenure Technologies - Summary of Services and Implementation, by C. Leigh Anderson and Travis Reynolds, EPAR Technical Report#357
https://evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/EPAR_UW_357_Review%20of%20Land%20Tenure%20Technologies_9.8.17.pdf


Erik Stubkjær, est@land.aau.dk, 2018-03-17; -15; 2017-10-24