President Stig Enemark visited Havana, Cuba, from 12th to 17th February 2007 as invited keynote speaker at the international congress Geomatica 2007. The congress was organised by Dr Tatiana Delgado as part of the XII Convention Informatica 2007, which included a range of sub-congresses and symposia with more than a thousand participants. Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés Menendéz, Minister of Information Sciences and Communications, headed the convention. The twenty sessions of Geomatica 2007, including about eighty presentations, focused particularly on geo–spatial data infrastructures. President Enemark gave a welcoming address at the opening session and a keynote presentation on “Land Management in Support of the Global Agenda” that included an overview of the current policies of FIG in a global perspective.

Keynote sessions also included presentations by Jarmo Ratia, president of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) and Alexandro Maratos, secretary-general of the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO). John Trinder, vice-president of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) also spoke, as did Harold Moellering of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). Keith Murray from Ordinance Survey UK gave an address, and so did Abbas Rajabifjard of the University of Melbourne, Australia, Joep Crompvoets of the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, and Tatiana Delgado of Cuba.

President Enemark also chaired a session on Cadastral Systems. This issue is of very current interest in Cuba, which is at present building a cadastral database for both rural and urban areas. The cadastre will mainly serve administrative purposes, as there is no private ownership of land in Cuba. Here, however, is good example of the need for cadastral identification at parcel level, even if this is not used as a basis for legal security of land rights. Instead, the cadastre serves the purpose of administering governmental allocation of rights to land use, as well as registering actual use of land and assessing the value of this. It was suggested that Cuba offer a presentation of this system, preferably to be included in the FIG cadastral template. During the conference President Enemark also had an opportunity to meet with the national surveying organisation (UNAICC).
www.informaticahabana.com

www.cadastraltemplate.org

Platinum Member

Bentley Systems Inc has joined FIG as a Platinum corporate member and will now take an active role in FIG in support of its strategy of advancing GIS for infrastructure. According to Oscar Custers, business development director of Bentley Geospatial, “Bentley sees the surveyor community as a fundamental contributor to the lifecycle of infrastructure. Infrastructure extends and builds upon the geometry of the Earth’s surface. Therefore, both the positional and geometric accuracy of the underlying maps is critical, especially as users start to model cities and other types of infrastructure in 3D.” “Bentley,” he said, “believes that FIG provides the perfect forum for understanding the needs of surveyors worldwide. Its engagement with the membership will help ensure that Bentley’s GIS and infrastructure engineering solutions further advance the cutting-edge of innovation in this important profession.” Professor Stig Enemark responded, “We are extremely gratified to welcome Bentley as a Platinum corporate member of FIG. It is important that we have close relationships with those companies that are shaping the market for infrastructure engineering and GIS software solutions. The two-way feedback between our other members and Bentley will benefit both the surveyor community and Bentley.” Other FIG Platinum Corporate members are ESRI, Intergraph, Leica, Topcon and Trimble.

OICRF

The International Office of Cadastre and Land Records (OICRF) is one of FIG’s permanent institutions. It is a documentation-and-study centre for land administration and is active in all areas of its tasks. These include the collection and systematic filing and indexing of all documentary material relating to existing cadastral and land registration systems in all countries, making comparative studies of this material and publishing the results. The Office also provides information and advice on all cadastral and land registration systems to all interested institutions or persons, whether for the purpose of study or to help countries wishing either to introduce a cadastre or a land registration system or to improve their existing system. It too maintains documentary material on a day-to-day basis; at present a digital library containing about 6,700 publications, such as conference proceedings, magazines, articles and reports on land administration. Since OICRF brings in available and new documents digitally it always has available in this form the most recent publications for users. Publications and documentation can be downloaded online in pdf format. In 2006 the digital library had about 280,000 hits, with 208,000 page views; about 30,000 articles were downloaded.
www.oicrf.org