Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Introduction

Building software for land records administration is difficult at the best of times. 

In addition to capturing spatio-temporal representations of parcel boundaries and 

associated records of title that do not always change in tandem with each other; 

such software has to accommodate a multiplicity of end user needs and settings. 

These factors may result in highly specific software that is not easily transposable 

between jurisdictions. Digital systems have the general goals of achieving greater 

transparency, currency, efficiency and quality assurance and control of data per-

taining to land ownership. However, in developing nations, where processes are 

not well developed and data quality is often poor, there is a danger that complex 

digital systems may overwhelm local expertise and be too difficult to maintain 

 relative to manual approaches. In these contexts the reality is that no single “pre-

packaged” solution can realistically meet all needs. Hence, beyond the above 

goals and the need for cost effective (affordable) solutions, land records manage-

ment software must be built that is modular, robust, flexible, easy to use and high-

ly responsive to changing conditions and local user knowledge and abilities.

The apparent paradox of introducing change to improve land records manage-

ment while potentially making the process more fragile is difficult to reconcile. 

One solution is to implement digital systems with coverage limited initially to 

 specific areas and with only basic functionality, leaving for future implementation 

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more complex issues such as customary rights and maintaining historical informa-

tion for an individual parcel or collections of parcels (Törhönen, 2004; Österberg, 

2002). However, it is possible, using a carefully planned software development 

 cycle, to build generic and core land records management functions that are ap-

plicable to diverse application contexts (i.  e. different countries as well as changing 

conditions within a country). Customized functions, written for the particular cir-

cumstances of one or another location as needs dictate, can then be built around 

this generic core. While proprietary software solutions are typically written with 

generic needs in mind, they often carry substantial overhead of various forms (e.  g. 

high initial and on-going costs, unused and perhaps unusable functions, require-

ments for particular input formats, and limited opportunities for customization 

etc.) that render their suitability questionable in developing countries. In contrast, 

it is possible to build solutions using existing free / libre and open-source software 

(FLOSS) that can be fused together with custom coding in flexible, yet modular 

and robust designs that can meet generic and particular needs as well as satisfy-

ing the goals noted above.

FLOSS provides source code to a potentially open-ended community of devel-

opers with an open development license, forming a virtual workbench for devel-

opers that can be eventually expanded, in this case, beyond parcel mapping and 

 title registration to include multiple interests in the management of land (e.  g. valu-

ation and taxation, planning, infrastructure such as roading and other utility 

 networks, natural resources and so on). In addition to the manifold advantages of 

FLOSS adoption (Christl, 2008), this approach is particularly well suited to develop-

ing nations as the overheads of proprietary solutions can be substantially reduced, 

while producing tools that are sensitive to local needs, conditions and languages.

However, while FLOSS projects are currently widely used and constantly grow-

ing in popularity in the geospatial domain worldwide (Ramsey, 2007; Hall and 

Leahy, 2008; Steiniger and Boucher, 2009), there has been very little in the way of 

concerted FLOSS development for land records management. This chapter de-

scribes efforts underway to remedy this absence with the development of an 

open-source cadastral and registry (OSCAR) tools project. This project has moved 

from an initial software prototyping exercise and international scoping workshop 

held in May 2008 

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, through to an assessment of the suitability of three nations, 

namely  Ghana, Samoa and Nepal as initial development sites. Further, a proposal 

seeking multi-year development funding and a high level conceptual software 

 design (Hay and Hall, 2009) have recently been produced. At the time of writing it 

seems  likely that the OSCAR project will commence in earnest in the first quarter 

of 2010. The following sections describe the OSCAR approach and the results that 

are expected from its implementation.

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 see 

http://source.otago.ac.nz/oscar

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