Land Information Management

A key component of land administration is the management of land and property related data. Such data may be held in manual or digital form although, increasingly, all land related records are being computerized for ease of storage and retrieval. Data are raw collections of facts that, from a land administration perspective, may be gathered and written down as numbers and text, for instance in a surveyor’s field book, or collected and stored digitally through the use of ‘data loggers’ and computers. They may also be held graphically as on maps or aerial photographs. Data become information when processed into a form meaningful to a decision-maker. The usefulness of this information will depend upon the quality of the data and especially on the extent to which they are up to date, accurate, complete, comprehensive, understandable, and accessible. Even then, good data do not necessarily produce good management decisions since other factors may be involved, such as the qualities of the data user; the converse is however true, namely that poor quality data will almost certainly result in bad decision-making. Land and property related data are increasingly managed within formal land information systems (LIS). As with all information systems, LIS use a combination of human and technical resources, together with a set of organizing procedures, to produce information in support of management activities (Dale and McLaughlin 1988). Increasingly, the technologies that drive the data processing are components of geographic information systems (GIS). There has been much debate about the nature of GIS, some seeing them as sets of hardware, software, and data while others have seen them as all-embracing institutional arrangements of which the technology is only part. In the following discussion, GIS will be treated as the former and restricted to the acquisition and assembly of spatial data; their processing, storage, and maintenance; and their retrieval, analysis, and dissemination. By analogy with the motor car, GIS are the engines that power the car and data are the fuel; operating a transportation system is, however, a more complex process.