Geographical Data and Metadata on Land Administration in Spain

Abstract

Spain has a tax-oriented cadastre with legal data about properties (ownership, rights, liens, charges, and restrictions) recorded in a separate property rights registry (henceforth called land registry). This paper describes the Spanish cadastre and land registry by focusing on the new coordination system set by Law 13/2015. Since Law 13/2015 came into force in Spain, cadastral cartography is the basis for knowing where land registry units are located. The new coordination system sets a procedure to update the cadastral parcel boundary of a property when it does not match with reality. In these cases, the free-profession land surveyor sends the new property boundary through the Internet in order to update the corresponding cadastral parcel boundary. Currently, neither the cadastre nor the land registry has considered storing geographical metadata for each property boundary in a standardised way. As boundaries show the limits of individual properties, boundary metadata denote the accuracy with which such ownership rights are indicated. We propose that, for these boundary update cases, the Spanish cadastre also allows the upload of qualitative and quantitative instances of the data quality class of the Spanish Metadata Core standard, and this information be available for users, for example in an XML file. These metadata provide justified information about how the boundary has been obtained and its accuracy. Software has been developed to manage this metadata of each property boundary, in order to allow us to evaluate whether or not this information is useful. We present the conclusions about some real-life tests of property delimitations.