FIG Commission 7 held its annual meeting in September 2011 in Innsbruck, Austria. This event culminated with the International Symposium Cadastre 2.0. Issues relating to land administration and cadastral perspectives are of high interest, namely in regard to citizens' involvement, crowdsourcing and social media, and to completion of cadastre and land registration in the developing world. This concerns about 75% of the 6 billion or so spatial units in use by humans. Key focal points for the Commission are management of government lands, pro-poor land tools (with UN-HABITAT), spatially enabled societies, climate change, the cadastral template, the Land Administration Domain Model and 3D Cadastres.

Technology will carry out more and more of surveyors' work in land registration. Cadastral surveying can be increasingly done by a greater number of people with a low level of education. We will not see so many cadastral surveyors in the field in the future. Surveyors' roles are undergoing changes affecting many aspects, including field surveys, information and quality management, and the support surveyors provide - in cooperation with other professionals - to national spatial data infrastructures. In the future, it is feasible that people will be able to develop their own cadastre based on technologies such as GoogleEarth and Facebook. Data reliability is our key contribution. There were many discussions about the need for an AAA Cadastre (Accurate, Authoritative, Assured) for advanced countries on the one hand and, on the other, the immediate need for low-cost solutions to meet the challenges in developing countries.

There was a contribution on the European Measurement Code for the floor areas of buildings and attention was paid to condominium rights. It was concluded that the development of cadastral systems in Asia is moving at an impressive pace, and that our colleagues from Africa need support for their actions in relation to their governments. FIG will provide alternative approaches in terms of implementation alternatives in cooperation with FAO. Other discussion points included disaster management and the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis for cadastre, and a visit was paid to a local cadastral office in Kufstein.

There is an urgent need for knowledge and information on the developments in cadastre and land registry, and the work of the commission is widely used for this purpose. It was agreed that ties with Géomètres sans Frontières should be strengthened, representing a challenge for the younger generation of surveyors to tackle.

Commission 7 would like to thank the Austrian Society for Surveying and Geoinformation for its support.

Soundbites

We are the generation that has made the shift from paper documents to digital cadastre - Christiaan Lemmen

Crowdsourcing within the emerging spatially enabled society is opening up opportunities to fundamentally rethink how professionals and citizens collaborate in land administration. Let's try it! Let's pilot it! - Robin McLaren

Listen to what people are trying to do - Matthew Delano

Only surveyors care about accuracy - Gavin Adlington

Future cadastre will be 3D, monitoring dynamics based on historic data, multifunctional and multi-jurisdictional, integrated into social networks, and it will become an essential element of the knowledge society - Giorgio Pauletto

Crowdsourcing has been used successfully in some contexts to improve geographical data. It is now an option that cadastral organisations will have to consider in order to support and advance the normal process - Chryssy Potsiou

There is a world outside the surveyors' community building up a parallel system. We need to find how to cooperate with these groups - Gerda Schennach