KCOD researcher Hendrik Ploeger is co-author of an article in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information __ on the registration of multi-level property rights in 3D in the Netherlands. The article reports on the first 3D cadastral registration in The Netherlands, accomplished in March 2016. The solution was sought within the current cadastral, organisational, and technical frameworks to obtain a deeper knowledge on the optimal way of implementing 3D registration, while avoiding discussions between experts from different domains. The article presents the developed methodology to represent legal volumes in an interactive 3D visualisation that can be registered in the land registers. The source data is the 3D Building Information Model (BIM). The methodology is applied to two cases: (1) the case of the railway station in Delft, resulting in the actual 3D registration in 2016; and (2) a building complex in Amsterdam, improving the Delft-case and providing the possibility to describe a general workflow from design data to a legal document. An evaluation provides insights for an improved cadastral registration of multi-level property rights. The main conclusion of the article is that in specific situations, a 3D approach has important advantages for cadastral registration over a 2D approach. Further study is needed to implement the solution in a standardised and uniform way, from registration to querying and updating in the future, and to develop a formal registration process accordingly.

The KCOD contributed to the 17th European Conference on Digital Government ECDG 2017 from 12-13 June 2017. Bastiaan van Loenen presented the paper entitled “Log File Analytics for Gaining Insight into Actual Use of Open Data” based on the research of Wouter Labots. Following open data policies worldwide, an increasing number of public organisations has now published open data that is free to be used by anyone. However, despite the significant increase in use of this open data, the open data providers are mostly not aware of their users and the way in which the data is actually re-used. We explored the use of log files of the actual use of open data to identify the users and to explore how the open data is being used. By means of a case study in which we apply log file analytics to the Dutch open geographical data portal we show that this approach is promising for analysing open data use. This approach will yield many new insights for open data providers to improve and fine-tune their open data offer and policy makers will be provided with data on actual use to evaluate their open data policies. Our analysis shows that citizens are a much heavier user of open data than currently assumed: citizens as major users of open government data should be taken much more seriously in the demand driven open data policies. We recommend transferring the pilot project into a permanent monitoring instrument for open data use and exploring additional analytics for using the rich data that log files provide for.

KCOD researcher and PhD candidate Agung Indrajit presented his short paper on ‘Multi-Domain Master Spatial Data Management for Open SII in Indonesian Smart Cities’ at the AGILE 2017 Conference. AGILE 2017, the annual international conference on Geographic Information Science organized the Association of European Geo-Information Laboraties (AGILE), was held from 9 -12 May in Wageningen, the Netherlands. This year’s conference theme was Societal Geo-Innovation, and several topics were covered: Big Spatial Data, Analysis and Visualization, Volunteered Geographic Information and Community Observatories, Socio-Economic Impact Assessment of GI and GIScience, and Technology Education and Training. Agung presented some of the first results of his PhD research as part of the conference track on ‘Spatial Temporal Analysis’.

Recently, the section Geo-information and Land Policy (Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft) and the University of Leiden joined hands in research into the state of digitalisation of land registers and public records in EU countries. The Centre for Safety and Security of the Strategic Alliance Leiden-Delft-Erasmus, a three university cooperation, has been awarded a grant for this project in 2015. Digitalisation of land register systems and public records makes a full electronic handling of real estate transactions possible. This ‘e-conveyancing’ offers promising prospects for the facilitation of a cross-border property market. Besides advantages like cost savings and accelerating the legal transactions of registered property, there are also risks involved such as fraud, which should be minimised. Currently, the status of e-conveyancing within the EU is being inventoried as well as the issues of cyber security. The second phase will have an in depth character, thus forming a basis for further working out a doctoral research.

On 6 December 2016, Frederika Welle Donker successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘From access to re-use: a user’s perspective on public sector information availability’.

With more public sector geographic information becoming available as open data and with rapid technological developments, a trickle of web services and apps based on public sector information can be witnessed. However, the predicted free flow of information products and services based on public sector information has not eventuated yet. The main challenge for open data will be how to measure the actual impact of open government data. To do so, an open data assessment framework is required that evaluates open government data not only from a data supplier’s perspective, but also from a (re-)user’s perspective.