During the week of September 2-6, 2019 a group of specialists of the National Cadastral Agency (NCA) went on a study visit to the Dutch Kadaster. This was the first study visit of the Twinning Project.
Seven NCA experts representing the GIS and IT departments took part in the visit.
The aim of this visit was to get to know the organisation and structure of geospatial services provided by the Dutch Kadaster and how to use this acquired knowledge in the development of the national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI) of Belarus.
On the first day the Belarusian delegation was received by the Director of Kadaster International, Mr. Kees de Zeeuw, who took NCA specialists on an introductory tour of the Dutch Cadastre.
Throughout the five days of the study visit, meetings were held with different specialists from the Dutch Cadastre in which the main services, technologies and infrastructures deployed in the Dutch Cadastre were presented.
The visit to the Dutch Kadaster for the NCA team was, in fact, more like a fact-finding mission. NCA specialists have found some of the facts about the Kadaster quite surprising. For instance, the staff of the Kadaster have no fixed working places: all employees, except managers, migrate from desk to desk while fulfilling their daily duties. Besides, the Kadaster has just one IT Department, which takes care both of the head office and the eight local offices neatly located near major railway stations, which is a huge advantage, as IT personnel have regular on-site workgoup meetings in different parts of the country.
As for other interesting practices of the Dutch Kadaster, the NCA specialists have learnt how a country’s address system can be improved. In the Netherlands, an address is given to a land plot as soon as the municipality issues a building permit. The practice of assigning addresses at such an early stage, in effect, saves the trouble of dealing with numerous address-related complications in the future.
Those who doubt the expediency of investing in spatial data quality improvement should be aware of the fact that for the United States, poor quality spatial data (or the lack thereof) results in more than $3 million in extra costs a year.
Another solution for harmonizing spatial data standards, which Belarus could analyze, is to set up an independent body similar to the Dutch Geonovum, whose objective is to provide practical assistance to all spatial data producers on standardization, metadata composition, preparation of data requirements.
Some facts the NCA staff has learnt about Dutch cadastral practices during the study visit to Apeldoorn give a lot of food for thought. For instance, the fiscal security guarantor role played by notaries in real estate transactions in the Netherlands.
The visit to the Dutch Kadaster has given the NCA staff the inspiration to study in more detail the INSPIRE directive and to use this experience in the development of national standards for the creation and use of spatial data in line with ISO standards. Also, it would be worthwhile implementing a topographic project for the City of Minsk, with an interactive web interface from the map archive to show how the city has grown over several decades or possibly centuries, and see the growth of the city’s territory in dynamics.
Another inspiration from the visit to the Dutch Kadaster could be a map quality improvement solution – a topographic map with a web interface to promote feedback from users.
In the following link you can access the complete program of the visit
All these presentations are published on the project extranet:
