Per Ardua Ad Cadastre

Last year I was getting to grips with the term 'mashup' which seemed to appear in every GI article I read.

Now I am finding many references to 'cadastres'. At the AGI council meeting last week, one speaker mentioned land parcel cadastres. An email received yesterday on potential subjects for our Chorley Day mentioned land values as a key component of cadastres.

But I don't know what a cadastre is. So off I go to try to find out.

Firstly I find that in Roman times a Cadastre is a land information system particularly minor roads, ditches and boundaries. The establishment of a cadastre was preceded by surveying (limitatio) and the establishment of survey markets (terminatio). One legacy of the Romans in Britain was the centuriation of land, basically an information system for land parcels based on grid structures.

Nowadays, cadastral maps define legal repositories of land ownership, value and location. The plotting of the edges of land parcels can be incorporated into a digital cadastral database. These can incorporate an interest in, and ownership of, the land parcel. This can be done for fiscal purposes, legal purposes or land management purposes.

And this is not just a historical process, but very much an integrated contemporary process which can map environments for 3D geomarketing which can use the visualisation of strategic information relying on geographic supports for decision making.

But I am falling into the trap of reason being submerged by jargon. So lets stop there for the moment and return later to learning more specific uses for cadastres.