Crowdsourcing and mobile services for a fit-for-purpose Cadastre in Greece

A ‘fit-for-purpose’ approach is suggested by FIG, the UN and the World Bank as the appropriate methodology for implementing a land administration system depending on a country’s urgent priorities. In this paper, the current official process for the implementation of the Hellenic Cadastre is analyzed and compared to the “fit-for-purpose” model. Some amendments are proposed to replace the initial stage of the data collection official procedure, to make it more fast, efficient and complete. These amendments are tested by a team of researchers of NTUA and the achieved results are presented. The methodology aims to save time, avoid gross errors and additional funds, and provide fast solutions for the completion of the National Cadastral reliably and affordably, during the period of the economic crisis in Greece, with increased citizens’ participation and the use of modern IT tools for the adjudication of the owners, the property rights and the other cadastral data acquisition. New m-services are proposed for the compilation of the cadastral surveys, supported by crowdsourcing techniques. A case study for a suburban area is reported. For the new procedure an open source, self-developed application named BoundGeometry, is used. The new procedure is compared to the official one in terms of time, quality, accuracy and gross errors avoidance. Legal matters related to the adoption of the proposed amendments by the National Cadastral Agency of Greece are also taken into account.