Spatially enabled land administration: bridging the gap

Good governance is a qualitative term or an ideal which may be difficult to achieve. Different people, organisations, and government authorities will define “good governance” according to their own experience and interests. In any case, almost all kind of government includes a spatial component. In other words: Good governance and sustainable development is not attainable without sound land administration or - more broadly – sound land management. The paper presents a land management vision that incorporates the benefits of ICT enabled land administration functions. The idea is that spatial enabling of land administration systems managing tenure, valuation, planning, and development will allow the information generated by these activities to be much more useful. Also, the services available to private and public sectors and to community organisations should commensurably improve. Knowledge management is about organising and sharing of knowledge just like spatial information management is about organising and sharing of spatial data. In relation to e-Government knowledge management is basically about designing and implementing suitable spatial data infrastructures that can improve the communication between administrative systems and also establish more reliable data due to the use the original data instead of copies. In Denmark, such governmental guidelines for a service-oriented ITarchitecture in support of e-government are recently adopted. Finally, the paper presents the role of FIG in terms of developing relevant land information policies in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The focus is on establishing an awareness of the value of integrating the land administration/cadastre/land registration function with the topographic mapping function. In other words: the value of bridging the gap.