Design and development of an LADM-driven 3D Land administration system: Lessons learned in Malaysia
Introduction
There have been significant stratified underground and aboveground developments in urban areas of Malaysia due to the scarcity of land and population growth in this country. The implication is that the 2D-based land administration system (LAS) of Malaysia is confronted with difficulties in capturing and mapping land ownership in complex urban areas. One problem is that flat and 2D-based representations may not conclusively show 3D delimitation of spaces inside and outside buildings that have irregular and complex shapes. Another challenge is that multiple pages of strata titles, which are used to show all the spaces of multi-storey buildings, surroundings, would impose a significant amount of cognitive effort for urban planners to establish economic, social, environmental and legal implications of the stratified urban developments.
Currently, Malaysian LAS relies on surveying and cadastral measurements defined as horizontal coordinates (X, Y) and managed within the National Digital Cadastral Database (NDCDB). NDCDB is a 2D spatial database for managing cadastral and survey information. However, the physical dimension of the land parcels in the real world is 3D, which means 2D approaches for capturing and storage of land parcels are not adequate to communicate ownership rights in complex situations (Atazadeh et al., 2016a, 2016b; Stoter et al., 2017; van Oosterom, 2013). In addition, some areas for improvement are identified:
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Data Redundancy: many attributes are repeated in different tables introducing data redundancy.
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Lack of Data integrity: Due to data redundancy, there are many values for the same attribute appearing in various tables.
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Lack of relationships between entities: Relationships between entities are often not defined, which reduces data consistency as well as data quality.
On the other hand, progressing towards 3D LAS in Malaysia should be considered based on standard models in cadastre and land administration (Kalantari et al., 2017; Rajabifard et al., 2018b). A well-known standard model is the international Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) that provides a conceptual model for recording and managing cadastral data (ISO19152, 2012ISO19152, 2012; Lemmen et al., 2015). It provides an extensible basis for the development and refinement of efficient and effective land administration systems based on a Model Driven Architecture (MDA), and enables involved parties, both within one jurisdiction and across different jurisdictions to communicate based on the shared vocabulary (i.e., an ontology), implied by the model (van Oosterom, 2018). The current 2D-NDCBD in Malaysia is not compliant to LADM.
To address the current limitations of 2D cadastral system in Malaysia, a 3D-based approach was developed to capture, compute and adjust 3D cadastral survey data, which would subsequently enable implementing a 3D cadastral database in Malaysia. In a simple term, upgrading 2D-NDCDB to 3D-NDCDB in Malaysia is about adding the height to corner stones of the parcels to improve the use of data in various applications including construction and engineering as well as land administration. However, this impacts a) existing surveying practices in order to capture height component of the land parcel, b) data modelling to be compliant with the LADM standard, and c) application stack to utilize open source technologies and workflow to minimize the overall changes to 2D-NDCBD. The data is captured in the field by surveyors, then it will be processed at the office. The process of data includes height adjustment, modification of new points, insertion of new points into the database and generation of the certified plan. This lifecycle is completed in terms of capturing, processing, managing and visualising 3D data.
More recently, strategies were proposed for the implementation of 3D-NDCDB, which includes the processes for upgrading the existing datasets and data collection methods to support the 3D digital data and the creation of 3D spatial database based on the elicited user requirements (Rajabifard et al., 2018a). It was also highlighted that the implementation of 3D-NDCBD is an initial step to develop a 3D cadastral system in Malaysia. The major motivation for this upgrade is to introduce an open-source 3D database, which is LADM compliant, to address issues with regards to the existing cadastral practices in Malaysia. The work described in this article provides an expanded version of the paper presented in the LADM workshop in Malaysia (Rajabifard et al., 2019b).
In the next section, current literature relate to LADM-based 3D LAS will be reviewed. Section 3 will introduce a methodology for capturing and adjusting height information in Malaysia. This is followed by designing a new LADM-based 3D-NDCDB for the Malaysian jurisdiction in Section 4. The prototype system is explained in Section 5. Afterwards, Section 6 provides a discussion on the benefits and challenges identified in this study. Finally, the paper concludes with major findings and future research directions.
Section snippets
Approach
In the context of Malaysia, there has been significant research on the adoption of LADM for this country. Zulkifli et al. (2015) highlighted the importance of the need for LADM country profile for Malaysia by identifying three arguments to upgrade land administration systems and enable e-Government services: government guarantee of indefeasibility of title to private properties; data integration to support good governance of land administration; and systematic and accurate capturing and
Review of LADM-based 3D LAS
There have been significant investigations on the adoption of LADM to handle registration and maintenance of various types of land data related to legal, administrative, and technical aspects (Atazadeh et al., 2018; Felus et al., 2014; Kalogianni, 2015; Kitsakis et al., 2018; Paulsson and Paasch, 2015; Rajabifard et al., 2018a; Zulkifli et al., 2014b). In this section, 3D LAS studies for adopting LADM in various countries will be reviewed. This will be followed by looking at the relevant 3D LAS
Survey methodology and height adjustment
The first step for implementing a 3D LAS is to capture accurate and precise 3D survey data. Therefore, this section explains the approach undertaken for collecting the required height information using surveying practices. The data collection method for height component to implement a 3D cadastral system in Malaysia is presented in this section. According to the LADM, in addition to 2D cadastral surveys, survey data required for 3D LAS is the surface information (height information) of the land
LADM-based 3D-NDCDB
The 3D data captured and adjusted by the proposed survey methodology, which is described in Section 3, should be stored in 3D-NDCDB. In this study, the design of 3D-NDCDB is compliant with the LADM standard and follows the standard practices of relational database design. Both spatial and non-spatial classes in Malaysian LADM country profile have been transformed into an object-relational database. To make sure that this database is LADM-compliant, we transformed the data elements (entities,
Implementation of a prototype system
Based on the developed relational 3D-NDCDB, a prototype system was implemented with these features (see Fig. 7):
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Modular design: Every module can be used independently. This enables JUPEM to use any of these applications based on their future direction for development of 3D-NDCDB.
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Modern application framework: The system architecture follows the modern application design
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Platform Independent: System can be used on various operating systems and devices.
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Open Source Software and libraries: Except for
Discussion
The motivation for this study was to identify a practical pathway towards realising an LADM-driven 3D cadastral system by considering current cadastral surveying practices in Malaysia. This study focused on data migration from existing database and development of various application modules for implementation of a 3D LAS. In developing the prototype system, this research investigated how the current 2D-NDCDB should be upgraded to 3D-NDCDB and how the current workflows and associated data to be
Conclusions and future work
This study demonstrated and confirmed that the Malaysian cadastral infrastructure is ready for an upgrade to include 3D digital data that follows the standard approach adopted by the LADM standard. It identified that the workflow of field surveying could be modified without significant overhead. The integration of vertical data with existing horizontal data will require a careful consideration due to varying degree of uncertainty that results from the different methods of data collection. The
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Abbas Rajabifard: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Behnam Atazadeh: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Mohsen Kalantari: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Hamed Olfat: Software, Investigation, Writing -
Acknowledgements
This study was conducted as part of the ‘Malaysian 3D Cadastre’ project. The authors acknowledge the support of project partners: Department of Survey and Mapping Malaysia (JUPEM), Malaysian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, and ENVIRO Land Services, Malaysia. The authors emphasise that the views expressed in this article are the authors.
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