© 2009 Ness Technologies – Proprietary and Confidential Public Access to Cadastral and Land Registry Data in Slovakia Rastislav Wartiak Project Manager, Ness Czech WPLA Workshop, March 5, 2010, Baku

2 Ness Technologies around the world Increasing global market share Canada Netherlands Czech Republic Slovakia Switzerland Romania United States Germany Portugal Hungary United Kingdom Israel Spain Italy India Singapore Malaysia Thailand 18 countries in 4 geographic regions About 7,800 employees Strong presence in Europe

Ness and Cadastre/Land Registry Czech Republic ► doing business since 1997 – Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre ► development of Information System of Cadastre of Real Estates covers all processes related to cadastre and land registry within the organization ► includes Internet access to data interactive web pages and web services (XML) generates documents with electronic signature supports e-conveyancing, in some cases even prepares the change automatically Slovakia ► first project started in Geodetic and Cartographic Institute ► publishing cadastral/land registry data from legacy systems – Cadastral Portal access to all public data is now for free ► development of new “core” system started in 2009 it will replace all current systems and integrate all tasks and data into one 3

Cadastre and Land Registry in Slovakia Joint cadastre and land registry 8 regional offices 72 local offices ► responsible for local data 10 individual systems maintaining the data ► only partially interconnected central database maintained as off-line copy ► updated every weekend 4

Presenting data on the web – original system 100 concurrent users outputs per day Only registered users Pre-paid or post-paid billing Updated once a week ► during weekend Outputs were not legal documents All users had to pay for data in the beginning ► very low usage Later, some government agencies were granted free access ► increase in system workload 5

6

Upgrade – free access to the data Slovak government decided to offer the data for free To improve public services and transparency concurrent users outputs per day Most of the users will be inexperienced with the terminology Result: ► HW upgrade ► SW redesign 7

8

9

10

11

12

Problems encountered – Performance Very high demand during first few days ► lowered to “regular” workload in three months Scaling infrastructure for this period is expensive ► only part of the HW is used after start-up period Using fewer resources results in system inaccessibility ► this occurs during media coverage – new service is promoted 13 Plan your new services in waves ► once one service becomes common add a new one Run other systems on part of the infrastructure ► combine new system implementation with HW upgrade for another one

Problems encountered – Incorrect data Data in the system does not always contain current and valid data ► paper archive is still the master Data fields contain mixed values ► e.g. “Last name” field contains first name, last name and social security number ► legacy systems did not contain structured data, not all was migrated correctly ► private data is displayed even though system does not reveal these fields 14 Invite users to help to make the data better ► implement simple “Report data problem” links and forms Define patterns of “public” or “sensitive” data and run checks ► e.g. numbers are not common in name

Problems encountered – Data misuse Data is public for querying but not for making copies ► only some types of queries are allowed, copy allows data mining Copying affects performance ► it can increase workload significantly 15 Introduce “copy text from this screwed picture” test ► humans can (usually) solve it, computers (usually) can not Limit number of queries during time period from one IP address ► human can not generate more than a few queries in a minute

Thank you Rastislav Wartiak Project Manager, Ness Czech Thank you Rastislav Wartiak Project Manager, Ness Czech