The Republic of Slovenia is currently in the process of implementing a GIS-based cadastral information system with the help of a consortium of national and international companies including GISDATA d.o.o., Esri's Slovenian distributor.

The contract to design, build, and implement the system was awarded to the consortium by the country's Surveying and Mapping Authority (SMA). Other consortium members include Hermes Softlab, Geodetski Zavod Slovenije, and Swedesurvey.

SMA is part of the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning and includes its main office in Ljubljana, 12 regional geodetic administrations, and 46 branch offices.

The technology to be deployed includes ArcCadastre from Lantm�teriet in Sweden and Esri ArcIMS, ArcSDE, ArcInfo, and ArcView software.

The Republic of Slovenia covers an area of 20,257 square kilometers. It is divided into 2,698 cadastral districts that include approximately 5.12 million parcels. The parcel is the basic unit of its land cadastre, and all of the parcel data has been digitized. In addition, there are approximately 1.5 million buildings in Slovenia, all of which have been added to the database through photogrammetric acquisition.

The country began the implementation of its GIS in 1999 when it was awarded a World Bank loan, which was used for partial funding of the modernization of its Real Estate Information System (REIS), a component of its Real Estate Registration Modernization Project.

When complete, REIS will provide the methodological and technological layout of the entire system including data model amendments and the design of an Internet application for managing and updating the interconnected basic and hosted data of the Land Cadastre and Building Cadastre registers.

In 2000, Slovenia adopted the Land Survey Service and Registering of Real Estate, State Border, and Spatial Units Acts, which significantly influence the management and updating of the registers for the Land and Building Cadastres as well as the accessibility rights of the users.

The country's central database for real estate data (CBN), which is managed by SMA, includes three primary registers. They are the Land Cadastre, which manages land parcel data; the Building Cadastre, which manages data on buildings and portions of buildings; and the Register of Spatial Units and House Numbers, which manages spatial units of administrative territorial divisions and house numbers.

Access to other data and registers under the responsibility of SMA, including raster and vector data, geodetic points, and the register of geographical names, will also be enabled through the CBN system. In addition, it will host other data related to land and real estate such as the Register of Administrators of State Owned Real Estate, Actual Land Use Register, Legal Regimes Register, and so on. CBN will also provide support for accessing the data in registers managed by other government institutions such as the Population, Land, and Business Registers.

The new cadastral information system will have two principal components. The Production System will be stored on a server(s) at the SMA main office and accessed and maintained exclusively by the SMA branch offices. It will be maintained through administrative and technical ArcCadastre processes. The editing of spatial data will be performed by private survey companies, which are authorized to submit changes to SMA branch offices using the GEOS software package developed by Geodetski zavod Slovenije with the data exchange capabilities built into CBN. The Distribution System will be held on a server(s) at the Government Centre for Informatics RS, which is the gateway for access to real estate data stored in registers for government bodies, businesses, and citizens.

For more information, contact Michelle Quistgard, Esri (tel.: 909-793-2853, ext. 1-1882; e-mail: mquistgard@esri.com), or Jerry Johnson, Esri Europe (e-mail: jjohnson@esri.com).