Reliable 2D Crowdsourced Cadastral Surveys: Case Studies from Greece and Romania

This paper is part of a doctoral dissertation (PhD) research that investigates the development of a procedure for reliable 2D crowdsourced cadastral surveying introducing the use of new Information Technology IT tools and increased citizen participation, supported by m-services. For the development of this procedure, the formal cadastral procedure applied currently in two Europeans countries, Greece and Romania, for their modern nation-wide projects is firstly investigated. The first part of this paper briefly investigates the current stage of progress of those projects in both countries, as well as the specifications and procedures applied for the cadastral surveys, and assesses the level of participation of the right holders and the efficiency of the current procedures. Then, a proposal for a crowdsourced general procedure with increased participation of the right holders in the initial cadastral data collection phase is designed that it may be of value either for the planners of those two projects to improve their projects towards a more fit-for-purpose approach and successfully meet the deadlines timely, or for researchers and planners of other projects with similar nation-wide approaches which also require accurate, assured and authoritative end products. For the assessment of the applicability of the proposal, three case studies are held and tested in urban, rural and suburban areas in both countries, using both a commercial application and an open source one. These crowdsourced surveys are compared to the formal cadastral surveys that have been compiled by cadastral professionals in both countries and the achieved results are assessed and judged as satisfactory in terms of geometric accuracies and the avoidance of gross errors in the location of the parcels. A proposal for future research in order to further improve the proposed procedure is discussed.