COMPLETING THE REGISTERTHE NETHERLANDS IS CURRENTLY DEVELOPING KEY REGISTERS OF CITIZENS, BUSINESSES, LAND, PROPERTY AND INFRASTRUCTURE. FLIP VAN DER VALK AND RICHARD SPOONER LOOK AT HOW THE PROJECT IS PROGRESSING AND EXAMINE AT THE STRUCTURED APPROACH MANY MUNICIPALITIES ARE TAKING IN EMBRACING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION IN THEIR TWIN ROLES AS PRODUCERS AND USERS OF KEY REGISTER DATA

The Netherlands is one of the most advanced nations in the world for e-government – second only to the Republic of Korea, according to a 2012 UN Survey. Local government has played a central role in this achievement, as it has been the main agency for creating ‘key registers’ of citizens, businesses, land, property and infrastructure.

The duties of local government in the Netherlands are divided between three types of bodies: 12 provincial governments, 26 water boards and 408 municipalities. Of these, the municipalities are by far the most important, spending the equivalent of 10 per cent of GDP, com-pared with less than two per cent for the other two tiers combined.

Much of the Dutch municipalities’ fiscal power stems from policy changes in the 1980s that favoured privatisation, deregulation and par-ticularly decentralisation. This lowest tier of government has increasing-ly been allocated more responsibilities as a way to give citizens greater control over public services and reduce costs. The municipality is seen as the single most important gateway into e-government for citizens and companies. It is also the single most important agency involved in

building the infrastructure to support e-government services on behalf of the public sector as a whole.

Local government has been mandated to create a number of key registers as part of a National Implementation Plan (NUP) for e-govern-ment. These registers cover addresses, buildings, people, companies, land parcels, property, taxes, infrastructure and topographic maps. The registers are kept in a single, central place and are used by all govern-ment authorities as a single, definitive record. Their significance is that they allow citizens to communicate with government bodies by provid-ing information only once.

Although the NUP came to an end in 2011, the e-government programme is far from complete and municipalities are still being relied upon to complete some of the key registers. They are carrying out this task in addition to their day-to-day responsibilities to provide local services. Fortunately, local government has been provided with considerable guidance as to the architectural designs to which their IT systems should adhere.

Municipal coMpliance

www.geoconnexion.com

NORA and her daughter GEMMAIn 2006, the Dutch government specifi ed a National Governmental Reference Architecture (Nationale Overheids Referentie Architectuur or NORA) as a standard informa-tion architecture for almost every branch of government. NORA sets out a common set of rules and regulations to facilitate informa-tion sharing, improve govern-ment’s services to its customers and encourage diff erent public agencies to work together.

The government has gone further by deriving from NORA a Municipal Model Architecture (GEMeentelijke Model Archi-tectuur or GEMMA) designed specifi cally to guide information and communication systems within a municipality. GEMMA also has siblings: MARIJ, PETRA, WILMA and others. These specify similar architectures for water boards, provinces, housing corporations and other (semi-) public organisations.

GEMMA consists of concepts and notions, models, architectural principles, standards and manuals, and is the most important roadmap for the development of municipal information systems in the Nether-lands. It dictates the information, applications and the necessary con-nections to national information systems that can and must be used to serve citizens, businesses and institutions. All Dutch municipalities are implementing GEMMA – they are obliged to by law. However, none have yet completed that implementation. The timeframe for implemen-tation spans beyond 2020 and is updated yearly.

Under GEMMA, the front offi ce of the municipality becomes a gate-way into government for both citizens and businesses (see Figure 2). It positions the key registers that the municipality has a legal mandate to supply in the back offi ce. Between the two is the mid-offi ce, where you fi nd a variety of processes and services, supported by a data warehouse. As the key registers in the back offi ce become live, the mid- and front offi ces assume greater importance. However, for the time being, most of the attention of the municipalities in the Netherlands is on ensuring they meet their immediate legal obligations to set up, populate, and integrate these key registers.

The signifi cance of the key registersThere are two ways of looking at key registers. The fi rst is to view the register as a national database, which is held by a central clearing house, such as the Dutch Land Registry (Kadaster). The second view sees the register as a national service – an access point through which to obtain the data. When they are fully operational, registers and access points will be the only valid and approved information sources.

Centrally-held information is known as ‘authentic data’. Its use is mandatory for municipalities and other governmental organisations. In addition, public agencies are not allowed to collect the same informa-tion in any other way. For example, the key register for buildings and addresses (BAG) holds municipal records of building geometries, years of construction, street names, house numbers and other information. Any governmental organisation that needs information as simple as an address will have to use the data stored in the national key register and not maintain its own address dataset. Table 1 (see page 26) summarises the progress made in creating the various authentic data registers.

With one eye on creating and using authentic data, municipalities are at the same time getting their own basic data in order. Here they are taking their guidance from the Local Government Quality Institution (KING), which released in 2007 the Reference Model System for Munici-

pal Key Registers (RSGB). This specifi es object-oriented data models for municipal key registers.

The RSGB is more than a local instance of a national data model, because municipalities need more information to complete their tasks than there is available in national registers. RSGB specifi es data models for the following entities: addresses, buildings, people companies, land registry, property taxes and large-scale topographic base map. An RSGB reference model consists of object types such as ‘living unit’ and ‘regis-tered person’; attribute types that inherit from this object types such as ‘gross capacity’ and ‘fi rst name’, and relationship types between these object types, such as ‘”registered person” staying in “living unit”’.

Each key register has its own data model and the RSGB describes the semantics between these sectoral models. The data model that is RSGB, combined with a mandatory data exchange format known as StUF, together form the central source of guidance for local govern-ment IT architects, and for IT suppliers to local government.

Location – where is it?What has been largely missing in the various standards are explicit rec-ommendations on how to treat geography or location. This is surpris-ing, as Kees Radstaak, managing director of Dutch IT company Vicrea Solutions, describes.

“A very large part of the production and service responsibilities of municipalities – maybe 70 to 80 per cent – can be directly or indirectly traced back to working with geo-information. Consider urban develop-ment, spatial planning, housing management, building regulations, pub-lic works and fi nance. They all involve location. The very act of locating objects is both a necessary and very valuable aspect of registering base data. The property of shared locations lets us bring together administra-tive and geometric data – data that used to exist in separate domains.”

Vicrea Solutions has addressed this omission in the specialist infor-mation systems that it has developed for the municipal market. What their systems have in common is a shared focus on the need to capture, manage, generate and present information involving spatial objects. It is a business focus which Vicrea refer to as ‘Spatial-IT’.

“Until very recently, Dutch municipalities were relatively autono-mous in the way they designed their IT systems,” notes Radstaak. “Although municipalities have common information needs, there was a huge diversity of IT systems being developed and supported. This proved to be quite ineffi cient, given especially that 55 per cent of mu-nicipalities have populations of less than 30,000, and lack the resources to maintain bespoke systems. We saw an opportunity to support municipalities with standardised Spatial-IT solutions, which conform to GEMMA, which allow municipalities to meet their legal requirements, and which explicitly recognised location as an important attribute.

“In fact, the standards mandated by GEMMA have helped facilitate communications between the products of diff erent software vendors, and given more freedom to Dutch municipalities to select ‘best-of-breed’ components from diff erent vendors. Vicrea was one of the fi rst suppliers to ‘open up’ their products to facilitate interoperability, and we have found the market to be receptive to the notion of not having to buy a complete product line.”

   Governance  

Solu%ons                  

RSGB                

Technology  

Legisla%on  and  Interna%onal  Guidelines                      

INSPIRE   NORA    

 

Registra%on  so:ware  

 

GEMMA  

IMBAG  

IMWOZ  

IMBGT  

IM…  

           STANDARDS       METADATA    

DATA  

OGC      SDI  Fram

ework  

 

Standardised  Architecture    

400+  municipali%es  

Data  Warehouse    

Warehousing  and  distribu%on  

Figure 1. Some of the standards infl uencing municipal IT architecture in the Netherlands

Figure 2. The GEMMA architecture

Midoffice  

Frontoffice   Midoffice   Backoffice  

     

Service  Bus        

Frontoffice   Backoffice  

Mun

icip

ality

 O

ther

 org

anisa

%ons

 

Customer  Contact  

Management  

Document  Management  

System  

Case  Management  

System  

Key  Registra%on  Management  

System  

E-­‐Document-­‐  and  Search  

registers  

Customer  Contact  

Exchange  Case  Exchange  

Na%onal  Clearinghouse  

Registra%on  of  Key  Data  

Na%onal  Registra%on  of  

Key  data  Na%onal  Portals  

Registra%on  of  Sector  Specific  

Data  

GeoConnexion International Magazine

Spatial-IT and spatial databasesThe information architecture that is GEMMA doesn’t prescribe any particular implementation of the RSGB data model. However, Vicrea recognised the advantages of implementing key registers in object-oriented spatial databases. Twelve years ago, it set about developing a suite of municipal IT applications built around an all-Oracle spatial data warehouse (Neuron) and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Today, more than 50 per cent of Dutch municipalities are using components of the Neuron suite.

The Neuron Suite consists of a large number of modules that have been classified into five product groups: Registration Neuron, Neuron Information, Internet Neuron, Neuron Integration and Neuron E-Servic-es. The Neuron Suite is supported by Neuron GIS, which is built upon GIS technology from British GIS developer Cadcorp.

Kees Radstaak says: “The idea behind the Neuron Suite is that every municipal application or data source linked to the ESB can be called upon immediately. This applies to the basic and core registers that municipalities are required to supply, to national clearing houses, to any municipality-specific data bases they may have, and to their third-party applications.”

People, addresses, and feature-based mapsThe key registers are the geoinformation building blocks in Neuron. These include the cadastral register, the addresses and buildings register, and the property register. These registers are the basis of the link Neuron makes between personal and building data, and Vicrea has developed applications for managing each of these (see Figures 3-5). Maintaining the quality of data contained in key registers is taken very

Figure 4. Registering addresses and buildings for the BAG key register. A user selects an item by clicking on the map. This reveals its attributes, history, relationships and any tasks associated with it

Figure 3. Internet Neuron combining information from three authentic datasets based on location: BAG, Kadaster and Persons. By doing so you can answer questions such as ‘Who is the home-owner?’, ‘Are they living in their own home?’ and ‘Are there any elderly people living alone in this neighbourhood?’

Changing the GIS landscapeOpen technology and standards-based solutions for sharing spatial data

Discover more at cadcorp.com

Police

Open

Government

FireHousing Insurance

Transparent

Dynamic

Environment

www.geoconnexion.com

seriously. Any public body finding or suspecting an error in a key register record has a duty to report it. In the Vicrea architecture, location is used in the mid-office architecture to preform data consistency checking. For ex-ample, a building may be marked as being in ‘residential use’ in the build-ings and addresses register. If there is any doubt about whether a person is actually occupying that building, the matter can be resolved easily by using the property of ‘shared location’ in the Vicrea data warehouse to bring together records on buildings and records on people.

Proof that the complete system is working as envisaged is begin-ning to emerge. Marco Scheffers, manager of key information for the City of Amsterdam, points out: “Here in Amsterdam council, officials in the Office of Key Registrations can now generate taxable objects with the proverbial push of a button. This automates the process of bringing together data from a number of different sources.

Municipalities are also major users of and contributors to geo-information about the above-ground infrastructure, sites and zones. An important source for this information is the GBKN (large scale topographic base map of the Netherlands), which is currently managed under a public-private partnership consisting of all network operators, municipalities, provinces and the Dutch Kadaster.

A transition programme was started in 2008 under the supervi-sion of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment to migrate to

a new national standard of topography. Transition to this new IMGEO 2.1 standard involves migrating over 500 2D vector databases to one uniform national object database: the BGT Key Register.

At the moment, GBKN mapping can vary in content and quality from one municipality to another and since it is not object-based, it is very difficult to link with other registers. Until BGT goes live, the Vicrea solution is to provide municipalities with GIS and web mapping appli-cations that use GBKN. At the same time, Vicrea is offering applications that help municipalities structure and migrate GBKN to BGT, and post BGT data to the Dutch Kadaster for authentication.

This central organisation is responsible for the validation of BGT mapping provided by municipalities and will be the only permissible source for large-scale topographic data used by public administrations in the Netherlands. The migration exercise will involve the creation of 1.5 billion objects. The national clearing house for BGT data at the Dutch Kadaster is to started receiving BGT data on 1 April. It has set a deadline of 1 January 2016 by which almost all topographic objects should be translated. By 2017, all governmental bodies will mandated to use BGT and by 2020 the BGT must be completely correct.

The mapping responsibilities of municipalities will not end with the successful translation to an object-oriented BGT mapping database, as Kees Radstaak notes: “Municipalities will still be responsible for reporting changes and capturing new map data. It is simply that the role of the sur-veyor will change from capturing CAD-like lines to capturing complete information about objects. We are already working with municipalities to facilitate that transition. We have no doubt that the availability of accurate and uniform large-scale feature-oriented base-mapping will act as a further stimulus to the use of GIS technology in the Netherlands.”

THE AVAILABILITY OF ACCURATE AND UNIFORM LARGE-SCALE FEATURE-ORIENTED BASE-MAPPING WILL ACT AS A FURTHER STIMULUS TO THE USE OF GIS

Flip van der Valk is product manager at Vicrea Solutions (www.vicrea.nl). Richard Spooner is marketing manager at Cadcorp (www.cadcorp.com)

Figure 5. Using a 360° view in base map registration. It is possible to measure and register objects included in BGT

Key register Code Description Status

Large scale topographic mapping

BGT Uniform topographic base mapping of the whole of the Netherlands at a scale of 1:500 to 1:5,000

Initial release planned for Q1 2016

Trade NHR All entrepreneurs and legal entities registered in the Netherlands Authentic data in place

Income BRI Income data on approximately 13 million citizens Authentic data in place.

Kadaster BRK Information about land and property, mortgages, rights (such as leasehold and tenancy) and pipe networks, plus cadastral mapping

First release of authentic data planned Q2 2014.

Wages, benefits and employment relations

BLAU A core set of data from the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency To be determined if the project goes ahead

Substrate BRO Data on soil, subsoil and geological structure. Authentic data expected to be in use from Jan 2015

Persons BRP Personal data on all residents and non-resident citizens of the Netherlands Authentic data in place

Topography BRT The unique source for all small-scale topographical information, updated, managed and delivered by the Land Registry

Various scales of vector and raster data in place

Vehicles BRV Data on vehicles and their owners, available nationwide for government agencies such as the police and tax authorities

Authentic data in place

Property valuation WOZ A valuation record of all fixed properties in the Netherlands. First release of authentic data in place

First release of authentic data in place. Working on connections to other key registers

Addresses and buildings BAG Basic information on all municipal buildings and addresses in the Netherlands

Authentic data nearing completion

Table 1. Progress in creating key registers

GeoConnexion International Magazine