ABSTRACT
Indexed by Track Subject
Indexed by Title
Indexed by Author
BIA Land Title Mapper
Track:  Cadastral and Land Records
Author:   Rodney Skinner

There are over 55 million acres of land held in trust by the United States government for Native Americans. This land consists of more than 250,000 individual parcels, supported by more than 3,000,000 conveyance and probate documents. Until the development of the Land Title Mapper (LTM) system and its supporting programs, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Realty Office mapping efforts primarily consisted of hand-drawn manuscripts or manually digitized GIS data layers. Such products could become obsolete within a few weeks or months. A methodology to create and maintain current land status and ownership maps for use by BIA land title and realty personnel as mandated in statute 25 Code of Federal Regulations section 150.9 & 150.10 was needed. In response to this requirement, the BIA's Geographic Data Service Center (GDSC) was tasked by Realty to develop LTM. GDSC designed and developed a simple, versatile GUI that allows the production of high-quality land status maps. Along with LTM, the GDSC produced an innovative automated parcel generator that creates GIS ArcInfo polygon and region topology coverages using the legal land descriptions maintained within the BIA's Land Records Information System (LRIS). The GDSC parcelizer is capable of successfully building more than 98 percent of the land descriptions submitted. A benefit derived directly from the database development for LTM is the identification of parcel spatial overlaps. This has allowed the BIA Land Title Records Offices (LTRO) to identify land records that contain errors. Running on a Microsoft Windows NT platform the GDSC LTM suite of programs makes extensive use of ArcInfo 7.2.1 AMLs, Microsoft Access, ODBC links and relates, Visual Basic, and Visual C++. ArcInfo region concepts are heavily relied upon to automate and perform analyses of land ownership and fractionated interest. This unique use of "owner" regions resolves the difficult technical issue of many-to-many relationships between trust land parcels and upwards of 1,000 owners per parcel. LTM is currently in use at four BIA LTRO sites.

Rodney Skinner
ACS/BIA GDSC
3000 Youngfield Street
Lakewood, CO80215
USA

Telephone: 303-231-5100 ext. 305
Fax: (303) 231-5122