Track: State/Local Government, Cadastral, Land Records
The Use of GIS in Land Registration Activities - The Qatar Experience
Mohamed Abd El-Wahab HamoudaRainier L. Luistro
The Real Estate Registration Department (RERD) is the only department authorized to maintain a land cadastre. Other agencies that require cadastral data must refer to RERD. RERD was established in 1967 with a manual system designed for the workload at that time. During the last twenty to twenty-five years, there was a phenomenal growth in urban development that created a relatively large volume of land-related records. As urban development rapidly expanded, the total number of parcels multiplied. Meanwhile, the RERD working procedures adopted during the end of the 1960s are still being applied for the current large amount of transactions. The current RERD data had outgrown the manual system being used. This creates problems for landowners, public planning, administration, and civil service functions. Lately, more attention has been given to land recording and management functions in Qatar, especially from senior government planners and organizers. It became evident that the existing land registration system needs to be developed to be able to handle the current as well as the future workload. As a result, CGIS started the long awaited GIS project in November 1994. Prime objective of the project is to develop a state-of-the-art real estate information system (REIS) to address the increasing problems such as duplicate/similar owners' names, ad hoc inquiry, nonstandard office procedures, redundant pieces of information, and many more issues. The new system with GIS technology will address the concerns related to RERD as well as other agencies dealing with RERD data. This paper discusses different activities of developing the REIS, such as technology in terms of hardware/software, data sources, data conversion, and data validation/quality control.
Mohamed Abd El-Wahab Hamouda
The Centre for GIS
PO Box 22088
Doha,
QATAR
Telephone:
Fax:
E-mail: mhamouda@gisqatar.org.qa