The process of developing a totally reengineered system for the management and tracking of a county's land records is no small task, and while there are highly sophisticated tools available to assist in this challenge, integrating them into a single system requires a thorough understanding of the business rules and the software being utilized to implement the system. This paper will present the results of PlanGraphics experiences with Chester County Pennsylvania's efforts to establish such a system and will cite the experiences gained with ArcStorm, ArcTools, and Oracle in developing a pilot parcel and planimetric data base in a distributed computing environment. A discussion of ArcStorm's feature locking and Oracle's integrity constraint capabilities and their impacts on the process of updating the data base will be presented.
Chester County, Pennsylvania, has been in the process of implementing a GIS to reengineer its Land Records System for two years. The system is establishing direct links among the major departments utilizing the GIS, WAN, RDBMS, and document imaging technologies to streamline the handling of the property data. The County's Land Records project consists of six core departments with plans to expand to the entire County. The reengineering process at the County consists of three major components. First-Establishing Business Roles: the presentation will describe the procedure followed for each department to gather the required information and the tools used to verify the findings within each department. The established standard operating procedures assisted the County and its consultants in developing the new business roles used to reengineer the land records process. Second-Institutional Restructuring: the requirement for reengineering the Land Records System originated with the County's decision to implement Uniform Parcel Identifiers (UPI), a geographic coordinate based number. Based on the current standard operating procedures, implementing the UPI required establishing a new division within the County, passing an ordinance, and changing the way documents were handled in the County. The presentation will describe the institutional requirements, in addition to the data needs and GIS tools that were needed to implement the UPI. Third and final-Application Development: the County chose ArcInfo and Oracle software to implement the County's Land Records System.
Background In 1992, the Quebec Government (Canada) launched the Cadastral Reform Program. The program will cost about $ 500 million and will provide the Government (Ministry of Natural Resources) with a digital cadastral database of 4 million parcels. Over 13 years, 1500 contracts will be awarded to private land surveyors for cadastre renewal and for mapping and geodetic work. As part of the project, DMR Group was awarded a $ 27 million systems integration contract to develop and operate information systems for cadastral reform to be used by over 200 internal users. This project is the biggest civil Geomatics contract to be carried out in Canada; it represents more than 220 person-years of effort over five years. DMR is responsible for the integration of hardware, software and services (work engineering, systems development, implementation, training, support and operation). DMR has brought together several companies (including Digital Equipment, Esri and Oracle) to supply products and resources, or provide supplementary expertise. The most GIS intensive applications developed include: (1) Management of Cadastral Reform Program: planning, awarding and managing cadastre renewal contracts (using existing digital maps as a basis) ; and (2) Management of Cadastral Data: supporting data input (in a normalized GIS format), quality control, data integration, data updating through digital transactions coming from private land surveyors, maps/files production for client use. Scope of the paper This paper presents the project and focuses on the fact that the system is a Mission-critical GIS application and that the ArcInfo application is transaction based and operational. The paper presents the way those aspects of the project were dealt with, both by the developer (DMR) and by the client.