Formulating a Central Digital Register
The client, a non-ministerial government department in the UK responsible for maintaining land registrations, sought to modernise the processes. This organisation keeps a track record for modernising land-related systems and plays a critical role in supporting the Government’s housing and infrastructure objectives. In order to enhance public access and improve operational efficiency, the client aimed to consolidate and digitize its land charge data.
The objective of the LLC Programme is to take all the English and Welsh local authority registers and replace them with a single digital register. This would establish the client as the sole registering authority and official search provider for LLC, enhancing accessibility and efficiency.
The existing maintenance system faces challenges of data fragmentation. Information was spread across numerous local authorities, as considerable data was in different formats & hard copies. Furthermore, understanding the data formats of each of the local authority and processing it in line with HMLR data schema of the centralised register presented a major logistical and technical hurdle.
As part of this LLC Programme, RMSI was commissioned to process data for 331 Local authorities in a phased approach across England and Wales for which the data is to be digitized and transformed into a live digital register. Around 4 million records are to be processed over a period of three years.
RMSI set up a team of GIS professionals having expertise and capabilities in transforming large set of text data and capturing/cleaning of spatial data. The team created a workflow management system for capturing data and spatial geometry into the required schema as agreed by the client.
The outcomes of this project will assist in providing a standardised, easy-to-read, digital format. All the data will be publicly available in a live database that provides instant online search results with 24/7 access to the data and many other use cases. The data will be captured, which will eventually migrate into the client’s database.
