Bentley's Support for 3D Cadastre Development

Cadastre has been playing a huge role in the development of our society since it aims at registering legal status and property rights associated to land. Cadastre is usually based on a 2D parcel description with associated land information. Although 2D representation simplification of our 3D reality offers advantages (e.g.: it can be easily represented on paper) it also involves several limitations when the existing situation is too complex to describe. There are many cases where infrastructure density leads to complex interleaving (overhanging structures; above and below ground infrastructures…). Furthermore, demographic forecasts expect urban population to double between 2005 and 2050. This assessment of current and coming challenges has been made several times and motivated numerous research activities suggesting the adoption of 3D Cadastre. This research identifies some of the technological limitations in implementing a 3D cadastre. The geospatial and engineering industries have evolved very quickly over the past few years. The development of 3D GIS technologies offers new methods to represent property ownership in 3D and to associate detailed attribution to those representations. The objective of this paper is to present a benchmark exercise in which Bentley Geospatial software was used to implement several scenarios in a 3D Cadastre. The results describe an architecture (a combination of desktop GIS applications with server based RDBMS) to implement different scenarios for a 3D Cadastre (Full 3D and Hybrid). The results illustrate how it is possible to combine advanced CAD technologies, such as Solid Modeling and Constructive Solid Geometry, to create and update intelligent objects corresponding to both 3D objects (infrastructure components) and 3D property units. Technology evolves very quickly providing new methodologies to present and manage land information. This paper provides an overview of the latest 3D GIS capabilities as applied to cadastre