The Bulgarian capital Sofia and the Bulgarian chamber of surveyors were host of Joint Meeting of FIG Commissions 3 & 7 and the Annual Meeting of FIG Commission 3 at 15-17 November. The workshop was titled “Information and Land Management. A Decade after the Millennium”. At the opening ceremony the participants were welcomed by the Bulgarian Minister of Regional Development and Public Works Rosen Plevneliev, the executive manager of Bulgarian Agency of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre Aleksander Lazarov, the chairman of Bulgarian Chamber of Graduated Surveyors Angel Yanakiev, the dean of Faculty of Geodesy in the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy Slaveyko Gospodinov, the chair of FIG Commission 3 Chryssy Potsiou and the chair of FIG Commission 7 Andras Ossko. Minister Plevneliev noted the problems in front of the Bulgarian geodesists and the possibility of the government to cope with them.
The presented papers were 41 and the presented authors were 61. The participants were 68 of 18 countries: Belgium (1), Bulgaria (32), Germany (3), Greece (7), Egypt (1), Israel (3), Spain (1), Italy (6), Canada (1), Cyprus (1), Macedonia (1), Nigeria (2), Netherlands (1), Norway (1), Poland (2), USA (1), France (2).
The focus of first technical session was at the land management of Bulgaria, where the most important presentations were of the president of Association of geodetic firms Misho Nastev “Surveying Companies’ State in Bulgaria” and the presentation of Zlatan Zlatanov “Production of Cadastral Map in Bulgaria” which marked the contemporary problems in the country. Very important in historical terms was the presentation of Ivan Katzarsky ”Bulgarian Surveyors and FIG”. Georgy Milev and I. Panchev presented the software of Blom Group as a modern geospatial technologies. Boris Krastev presented some problems about the management of the property of Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
In the second technical session the public was attracted by the presentation of the Honorary FIG President Robert W Foster “225 Years of Land Management in the United States” and the presentation of big friend of Bulgaria Helge Onsrud with “Protecting land in Norway through state ownership and public restrictions on private land”. Very important issue was the presentation of the chair of commission 7 Andras Ossko about the sustainable land administration. The work of Bulgarian antarktic scientist Borislav Aleksandrov “Surveying and Hydrography in the Area of the Bulgarian Antarktic Base on Livingston Island, Antarctica” was very appreciated by all the professionals.
The practical issues about the decision making in urban arias were present at the third session “Urban Management” where the paper of Alireza Gharazoglou of university of Teheran marked the highlights of the assessment of urban developmental plans to reach sustainable development using GIS/RS in an aria of Iranian capital. Nikolay Naydenov presented the paper about the land urban consolidation and Maria Nikolova about the improvement of e-government services using GIS. Jaroslaw Bydlosz, Pawel Hanus, Piotr Parzych were focused on the various aspects of information concerning real estates in Poland and Demetris Demetriou, John Stillwell, Linda See – on IPDSS for land consolidation. Bashkim Idrizi, Murat Meha, Pal Nikolli, Ismail Kabashi depicted the problems with data quality of global map.
The second day was focused on security of tenure a decade after the millennium, SDI, housing, planning and development permitting. Otmar Schuster presented the transaction in the digital age register-property cadastre-mortgaging. The chair of commission 3 Chryssy Potsiou in cooperation with Sofia Basiouka presented the problems with land expropriation in Greece. Bert Hoeve marked the case steps for complete land information management in Netherlands. The assessment of land administration in Hungary were presented by Gyula Ivan and very motivating for Bulgarian public was the paper of V. Karabelas, L. Varela, El. Lykouropoulos about the Greek monitoring system based in high-resolution imagery for inspection of unauthorized urban development in northeastern Attica. Hartmut Muller (in cooperation with Falk Wurriehausen) presented the case study on local SDI implementation in Germany”. The italian experience of using GIS for land management was the subject of paper of Paola Ronzino and Bruno Razza depicted the the role of the land surveyor in italian system. Smadar Morik and Sagi Filin focused at the consequence of land degradation processes in the Dead Sea. Rafic Khouri presented the French project for a cadastre in Haiti, and in the video Miguel Calvo Melero showed the implementation of GIS in the decision making. Muhammad Bashar Nuhu presented the problems in Nigerian real estate market and the Polish experience of alternative housing was the subject of presentation of Jaroslaw Bydlosz and Piotr Parzych. Andrea Massaro focused on the authorization procedure for precise land use- buildings- data bank. Another important topic was the presentation of Efi Dimopoulou and Tassos Labropoulos about management of church owned land in Greece. The last session Cadastre and Land Management was more technical and concrete where David Siriba and Monika Sester presented the alignment in the geometric enhancement of graphical cadastral datasets, Anna Shnaidman, Uri Shoshani and Yerach Doytsher focused on the stochastic approach for improving the current cadastre accuracies, and Richard Molero, Michael Barry and Andrew Hunter explained the possibilities of XML-based land records database. Sofia Basiouka showed the problems of use of dynamic maps and volunteered geographic information in Greece.
After the workshops was the annual meeting of Commission 3 of FIG where Yerach Doytsher was elected as a chair of FIG Commission 3.
For Bulgarian surveyors this meeting was a key occasion to show to the Bulgarian government the importance of cadastre and land management. The support that all the participants gave to Bulgarian professionals, coming in Sofia for this meeting, is really important in these days of financial crisis and lack of state investments in the field of cadastre.
