public v. private

Interesting back and forth regarding public v. private approaches to maintaining a national cadastre.

We spoke at length with First American Spatial Solutions during the ILRIS project. Boundary Solutions also. FASS seems to have a more practically tuned machine for moving toward total national parcel coverage, and are receptive to public/private development of a 100% Maine mapdown.

Most remarkable in this ongoing debate is that even at this late date no clear, proven course exists to navigate through these difficult waters. Taxpayers still feel taken (and maybe they are) if their locally funded data ends up repackaged for profit in the hands of aggregators. But the data are public, and it is difficult to deny that subjecting them to modern information technology and freeing them from their silos and stovepipes is the right way to go. It sure seems so aesthetically. And it has sure proven to be the case over and over and over again practically.

So maybe it just comes down to the fact that the private aggregators haven't presented an adequate quid pro quo in this area - a "google sop" - which makes the sense of privacy invasion and asset poaching acceptable since the applied technology delivers sufficient utility to offset it.

happy terminalia

Terminus, in Roman mythology, was the god of boundaries and protector of both limits of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post set up in the ground.

On the 23rd of February (the end of the old Roman year) a festival called Terminalia was held in the ancient city and its environs. Owners of adjacent lands assembled around common boundary stones and crowned their sides of the stones with garlands, incense, fruits, honey and wine. Proceedings closed with songs to the god and general merrymaking, in which all members of the family and friends took part.

Any one who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

parcels: where they are

Here's a way to actually pan and zoom around the state to see what the parcels look like, where they are available, where they're not, how they match at the edge of town - that sort of thing. At the moment it only includes towns that have received parcel grants and submitted their data to the GeoLibrary, and UT towns. And it's only being used for generic viewing of geometry with some identifiers included. But it's a start.

counties

Making the GIS case to county registries is a fascinating exercise, to be sure. Given the facts on paper, it should be a slam dunk: reams of location-specific data in the form of deeds and registered surveys and easements and all manner of other documents; much of this content already scanned to high quality digital formats; and no existing geospatial linkages permitting this content to be queried and accessed from the GIS context.

So what to do? Obvious! Geotag these scanned documents with an x,y reference that makes it easy to expose them to geographic searches.

And yet... Maybe not so obvious. The registers themselves are admirably dedicated to the serioiusness of the job, which is protecting and maintaining the integrity of vital documents. Any technology or procedural change that threatens this process is rightfully suspect. So the concept of potentially contaminating documents with shoddy geographic referencing is no easy sell to make.

It warrants serious consideration though. As information technology increases access to public records, whole new categories of opportunites tend to arise. It would be rewarding to see the County Registries benefit from these opportunities.

enforced inefficiency

Even if plenty of resources are available to implement a statewide digital land records system; even if a seamless, fault tolerant, all inclusive technical plan is created and implemented; even if all data from all registries and municipalities throughout Maine could be marshalled into a database that allowed querying on any aspect of any parcel and its attributes - even then, the privacy issue would stand in the way.

As I spent some time this week on dirt camp roads and woods paths I wondered a lot about the benefits of not always having access to the straightest line or the widest road to get where one is going. If I do not need to spend time in a town office or deeds registry, to show my face or get to know local officials in the process of prospecting for property or investigating land, I free up resources that I and others would spend searching. So there is an efficiency gain. But is some interaction that may be beneficial from the local perspective, some check and balance of personal introduction and exposure to those keeping the records - is some element of this necessary to protect the land?

mma tech + land records

The planning team presented the project to a large and engaged crowd at the Maine Municipal Association Technology Conference on March 18. The Integrated Land Records System slides from that presentation are avaialble below:

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public + accessible, circa 1980

In 1980 the National Research Council published a study titled "Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre." Many important studies on the topic have been produced since this one, but it stands as a kind of ur-document for multijurisdictional, large area cadastral planning in this country. From this study, a critical quote:

“The land-transfer process in North America is founded on the principle of publicity, the concept that all information relating to the nature and extent of interests vesting in a legal parcel of land must be available for public inspection” (NRC, 1980, p. 9).

This is by no means universally understood to be true here in America and Maine.