This is after exactly 800 blog-articles the very first time, I put some English content in here. The thing is, my English is good enough to solve any every-day-problem during some holidays in the USA, I would think even goog enough to live a daily life there or to join some business-meetings. But normally I am not able, to write an special-interest article about geospatial developments in English. So I wrote it in German for the „GIS Trends & Markets – The Geomatics News Magazine“, which is published in both languages. They are so kindly, to translate my work. And they also give me permission, to publish the english version here. So the international readers (..if they exist…) now can get an impression about whats going in Germany with the „Official Property-Land-Register Information System“ so called ALKIS, which is a big thing for the many Surveying Authorities in Germany.

Sorry for those of you, who want a German version. You must buy the magazine

….hmm….
okay, that was a joke, there is an e-paper-version here.

Cutting the last Ties

ALKIS exists! The first municipalities of North Rhine-Westphalia have converted their land-registration offices to the new standard, and many regional surveyor’s offices intend to follow suit in 2010. It’s now all up to the municipal authorities and the private persons affected – but clear answers are still pretty thin on the ground.

After a gestation period lasting many years and seemingly neverending complications during the actual birth, the long-awaited baby is now about to see at least a little of the light of day: ALKIS (Amtliches Liegenschafts-Kataster-Informationssystem; i.e. ‘Official Property- Land-Register Information System’) has finally found its way into the first governmental land-survey offices in Germany. Its aim is to combine the existing Automated Property Map (ALK) and the Automated Property Register (ALB) into an integrated data set and is part of an even more ambitious project – best known by its abbreviation, ‘3A-model’ – that has been occupying Germany’s state landsurvey offices to a greater or lesser extent since the mid-1990s.

In addition to ALKIS, two further ‘A’ names of importance are ATKIS (‘Official Topographical-Cartographical Information System’) and AFIS (‘Official Fixed-Point Information System’). These governmental topographical and land-registration databanks are to be combined with the aim of creating a national basic database that is uniform and well-integrated. And, in the wake of this changeover, the Gauss-Krüger co-ordinate system will become a thing of the past, and positional co-ordinates will be obtained via the ETRS-89 (European Terrestrial Reference System). All of this was decided back in the last millennium, and the original timetable envisaged that all German states would have begun introducing ALKIS by 2005 at the latest. In an interview given in 2001, Horst Gotthardt – then the managing director of Sicad Geomatics (now AED Sicad) – speculated that this might well mean that the last state would actually have reached this stage by 2010.

“Well, with wisdom of hindsight, even that was too optimistic”, is how Gotthardt now regards his remarks back then. As things stand, the fact is that it’s only now that the first German states are commencing with the introduction of ALKIS. A mere five municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia (Coesfeld, Solingen, Leverkusen, Lippe and the Rhine-Erft-County) have got as far as already producing their land-register data in accordance with the precepts of ALKIS, because in this state, such data are not in the hands of a central landsurvey office but are the responsibility of local district and municipal authorities. As a result, any such authority which decides to press ahead in this area can do so alone and without external interference. One outcome of this, though, is that the format of land-register data may be different in two districts bordering directly on each other. Thus, the prospect of ALKIS leading to uniformity of data at a national level seems even more remote, at least during a transitional phase.

Referring to his earlier assessment of the ALKIS timetable as drawn up by the Working Group of Surveying Authorities (AdV), Gotthart (now a member of the steering committee of the GIS Round Table in Munich) says, “I’ve always said that this won’t work the way the AdV thinks it will”. Nonetheless, he never reckoned with delays of 5 to 7 years. No wonder suppliers in the GIS branch involved in the ALKIS program unanimously speak of “terribly long barren phases” in the development of suitable software solutions. The principal companies involved, AED-Sicad und ibR Riemer, both have their headquarters in Bonn and, depending on how you look at the figures, share between 60% and 80% of the market relating to state surveying authorities.

One reason for the delays is certainly the sheer scale of the undertaking: ALKIS means converting digitalized land-registry maps to a system of object-related data management – and thus spells the irrevocable end of cartographically influenced data management in the form of graphic layering, which was long (and, in many cases, is still) offered by geoinformation systems. ALKIS therefore represents the final step that will take geodesy into the modern information era. It thereby also means cutting the last ties with the century-old world of cartography. ALKIS has nothing whatsoever to do with maps; instead, it is a data model through and through, i.e. The replication in a computer of reality as it is perceived by the land register. The map is now nothing more than an interface between people and databank.

It follows that the heart of ALKIS is a catalogue of object types, the GeoInfoDoc. This is now available in version 6.0, a 516-pagethick PDF describing every object in the real world that might conceivably be relevant for surveying and mapping, and also defining it for ALKIS. No less than 99 various ways of marking a border point are included. And also the object type, ‘building’, evidently takes into account every possible characteristic and peculiarity. In all, 228 modes of building use are listed in relatively logical groupings, even including, for safety’s sake, a further category of use “not to be specified from the available sources”. While most data models set out to simplify the complexity of the real world in order to make the operation of the model practicable, ALKIS represents an attempt to capture the complexity of reality as comprehensively as possible.

By its very nature, this is bound to take time, particularly in a political system with many federal elements, in which it is necessary to find a consensus about reality before one can set about replicating it. Even after ALKIS has been implemented, surveying will remain a matter controlled by individual states; thus, during the normal working week, the standardization of data and co-operation between specialists will not always be put into practice quite as well as the AdV claims in its Sunday statements. Over the last years, the appearance of more and more new versions of GeoInfoDoc have not made the work of software companies and IT specialists any easier.

Every German state has its own various specialities up its sleeve that it is determined to see integrated into a mutual data model. If ALKIS was a project of a private company, it’s highly likely that a controller would have stopped it for cost reasons alone. And it is at least probable that only an authority like the German land-registry office, which rarely attracts political scrutiny, could be capable of implementing something like ALKIS over a time period of 15 years without being plagued by doubts and misgivings.

There can be little doubt that a number of municipalities are hoping in secret that the whole project will run aground on its own complexity, so that they are spared the considerable effort of making the changeover. Because ALKIS necessarily brings a number of administrative and organizational adaptations and alterations in its wake. As it combines ALB and ALK databases that were previously administered separately, the updating of these data, at the moment when the changeover takes place, has to be precisely synchronized, while their subsequent management has to proceed on an integrated basis, too. While cartographical parameters may be greatly affected by the change, even bigger alterations are faced by what used to be called the Property Register. The boundaries of plots of land on the map change much less often that information about the owners and the use of a property. This means that procedures are now required that can provide data that can updated pretty well on a daily basis.

Another factor is the further usage of such data for official and nonofficial purposes in the municipality, for example for an official register of trees, a city land map or as a point of reference for plans relating to land utilization and building development. This means that every municipality needs to be prepared for changes. It is noticeable that two basic strategies have emerged, these depending whether the new developments are regarded as a chance or as a threat. Those that are rather wary of ALKIS will be content with only “a superficial implementation” of the changes, as an insider puts it. This means that the Uniform Databank Interface (EDBS), with which land-register data have been read or passed on up to now, will be replaced by the new, official, Norm-Based Exchange Interface (NAS), after which one of the NAS converters already offered by numerous suppliers will be employed to transfer the data to the existing solutions and specialist applications. To do this, it is unnecessary to organize any new procedures outside of the land-register office or to adapt any application modules. A ‘low-calorie’ version of ALKIS, so to speak.

Actually, as the conversion is unavoidable anyway, ALKIS does indeed offer an opportunity to raise the pace with respect to the subject of geo-data infrastructures (GDIs). Object- oriented data management facilitates a great deal in this area. ALKIS might, in addition, turn out to be the goose that laid the golden egg, because for the very first time at a national level, it will make available a large number of objects within a data structure that will provide the basic technical prerequisites for selecting out individual types of object and making use of these in other contexts.

The 228 types of buildings already referred to distinguish between, for example, museums, churches, post offices, libraries, buildings on camping sites, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, shops, shopping malls, and petrol stations, on the one hand, and less usual functions such as greenhouses, salt-works and watermills, on the other – all of which are points of interest for suppliers of location-based services and navigation solutions. A fair number of (tourist) information portals would also be improved by including this sort of data. And these are only the data relating to buildings…

It has to be said, though, that the responsible surveying authorities apparently have problems ‘selling’ ALKIS as something that might be marketed. And viable licensing models have yet to be devised, anyway. While official governmental applications are bound to be the focus of attention, years of resounding statements announcing the vast dimensions of the coming upheaval that ALKIS will mean for land registration have tended to frighten users rather than awaken their curiosity.

Instead of outlining the new possibilities opened up by ALKIS, most presentations of the last decade have begun with lengthy explanations of forthcoming difficulties. “The damage done so far has been immense”, is how a good few of those involved self-critically weigh up the present situation. At the 2004 Intergeo, Martin Fornefeld of Micus Management Consulting was already complaining that, when considering ALKIS, the land-registration authorities could think of nothing but the technical aspects and had utterly failed to present either a ‘branding’ concept for ALKIS or a product profile with a list of unique features, to say nothing of anything like intelligent marketing strategies.