A Feasibility Study on CityGML for Cadastral Purposes

The cadastral organization in the Netherlands, called the Kadaster, takes responsibility for the registration of land and property. In the current system used by the Kadaster, a piece of land, called a parcel is associated with legal information such as ownership right and ownership boundaries. A parcel may be associated either with a single ownership right or multiple ownership rights. For example, a parcel having a house owned by a single person indicates single ownership right and a parcel having a building with several apartments, each owned by a different person indicate multiple ownership rights. On selecting a parcel, its legal information is produced to the user. However in the case of multiple ownership rights, it is difficult to associate which part of the parcel is owned by which person. To address this issue, the current system produces a scanned image of the floor plans of the given building. These floor plans indicate the ownership rights of each floors. But the information from the scanned images of the floor plans cannot be interpreted by a computer for queries. Hence, there is a need for an alternative method to deal with parcels having multiple ownership rights. This thesis proposes the use of CityGML to visualize and to store cadastral information into buildings having single as well as multiple ownership rights in 3D. CityGML is an XML based, common semantic information model for the representation of 3D city objects. In order to represent legal information into CityGML, this thesis proposes an extension to CityGML for cadastral purposes. It also provides an automated process to represent legal information in extended CityGML. As a result, this thesis presents a proof of concept for a way to represent the multiple ownership rights associated with a given parcel.