The Cadastral System in Greece Dr. Dimitris Rokos KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. (Hellenic Cadastre)
General information Greece is a country with an area of 132.000 km 2 and about 11 million inhabitants. The Country is mostly mountainous with over 15.000 km of sea shore and over 3.000 islands and islets. The land is highly fragmented and due to the strong urbanisation of the last 50 years, most of the population is concentrated in few big cities and great extents of rural and mountainous areas have been abandoned.
History of the cadastre in Greece -1 The registrations and mortgages system Since 1853, the French-originated system of registrations and mortgages has been operating in Greece. A person-centered system mainly based on the maintenance of directories of the persons who have performed real property transactions. Each personal record registers all the real property transactions performed by a single person in a given area. The system ensures the publicity of the registrations, but it does not provide legal security of the registered ownership rights
History of the cadastre in Greece -2 The registrations and mortgages system The location of a real property, its shape and its geometrical dimensions are not systematically registered. Also Back in the 1830s, the Greek State became the owner of the largest part of the Country as the successor of the Ottoman Empire. This information, however, never got registered in a systematic and uniform manner. A person can acquire ownership of a real property (if it does not belong to the State) by using and exploiting it in good faith for a period of 20 years, even if he has no legal title, thus without being registered in the system.
The Cadastral Project The project of the Hellenic Cadastre was initiated back in 1994 by the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works. The goal of the project is the development of a uniform, systematic and always up-to-date collection of registrations, which consist of the geometric description and the ownership status of all the real properties of the Country, overseen and guaranteed by the State. Additionally, the Hellenic Cadastre may register a wealth of other information that can contribute to the growth and development of the Country. From the definition mentioned above, it becomes evident that the term Cadastre in Greece is used to describe a combination of Cadastre and Land Register.
Procedure for developing Cadastre -1 The procedure for developing Cadastre in an area (cadastral survey) is the following: First, the Minister of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works declares an area to be under cadastral survey. The cadastral survey office is established. The preliminary cadastral basemaps for the area under cadastral survey are produced. All persons who have real property rights in the area under cadastral survey submitted declaration and submit it along with a copy of the documents that support their declaration (i.e. notary deeds, court decisions) to the competent cadastral survey office. During this phase, the beneficiary must also identify his real property on the preliminary cadastral basemaps. The time period for the submission of declarations is three (3) months for the beneficiaries who live permanently in Greece and six (6) months for people living permanently abroad. The declarations and the legal documents submitted with them are processed and cross-referenced along with all the existing administrative acts in order to verify the legal validity of the claims as well as the correct positioning and delineation of the real properties.
Procedure for developing Cadastre -2 Preliminary cadastral tables and maps are drafted. The public presentation of the cadastral tables and maps in the cadastral survey offices for the inspection by all interested parties is officially announced. The public suspension of the cadastral survey data lasts for two months. During this period, beneficiaries have the right to submit applications for the correction of obvious errors or file objections, depending on the occasion. For the judging of objections, an independent Objections Committee is formed, which is chaired by a judge. After the correction applications and appeals are examined and the relevant decisions are issued, the cadastral tables and diagrams are reformed. An official decision declaring the cadastral survey as completed and defining the commencement of the operation of the Cadastre at the surveyed area is issued. The local Mortgage Office commences its transitional operation as an interim Cadastral Office.
Institutional and organisational structure of the Cadastre Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works Ministry of Justice Hellenic Mapping and Cadastral Organisation (HEMCO) supervises supervises supervises supervises assigned the development and maintainance of the Cadastre to KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. Mortgage Office supports supports Interim Cadastral Office becomes supervises Cadastral Office becomes
Technological Infrastructure KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. has taken major steps into setting up a technological infrastructure that: supports effectively the development and operation of the Cadastre, by providing advanced technological solutions that ensure security, high availability and performance, standardization and quality control of all the procedures. provides modern services to the citizens especially during the cadastral development stage builds up a high performance data infrastructure that can effectively support the operation of state administration in multiple levels, as well as become a major player in the context of INSPIRE.
Services: Development of the Cadastre -1 During the phase of the cadastral survey, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. offers a series of services to all the parties involved in the procedure: For all the persons (natural or legal) who want to declare their real property to the Cadastre, we have developed an online internet application. Through this application a user can: declare all the information necessary to register his/her property to the Cadastre identify the location of the declared real property on orthophotomaps pay the fixed cadastral fee using his/her credit card send scanned copies of the deeds that support his/her declaration print a receipt document which summarizes the basic information of his/her declaration along with the reference numbers given by the system.
Services: Development of the Cadastre -2 For the legal persons that have a great number of rights to declare, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. developed a special application to allow them to develop a database with all the information about their real property rights, and submit it electronically to the Cadastre. For the contractors carrying out the cadastral survey projects, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. has developed a special IT system installed and operating concurrently by over 1.000 people working in all the cadastral survey offices (78 in number) as well as the contractors backoffices. This system is used to receive, register and geo-locate on orthophotomaps all the declarations. All the information registered by this application is in real-time stored in KTIMATOLOGIO S.A.'s data center. The system allows: uniform codification of all the information registered, online checks that prohibit a great number of mistakes during data entry, computation of the corresponding cadastral fee for each declaration, real time monitoring of the progress of the work and real time access to all the declaration data from KT's headquarters.
Services: Development of the Cadastre -3 Also, during the cadastral survey period, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. provides special services to the public agencies managing State property: With respect to the protection of forests which for the greatest part of the Country belong by default to the State, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. develops forest maps. Forest maps involve the delineation of forested areas based on 1945 aerial photos and on recent aerial photos. With respect to the protection of coastal zones, which belong to the State, during the cadastral survey of a specific area, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. develops special basemaps with a detailed relief representation, in order to assist the competent agency of the Ministry of Economy and Economics to delineate coastal zones.
Services: Operation of the Cadastre-1 With the commencement of the operation of the cadastral offices, each office is supported by the cadastral information system that has been developed by KTIMATOLOGIO S.A.. The system provides as its basic services the registration of new deeds which can create, modify, transfer or annul elements of the rights registered in the Cadastre, as well as the issuance of copies, certificates and extracts according to the provisions of the cadastral legislation.
Services: Operation of the Cadastre-2 KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. is also responsible for the maintenance of the spatial cadastral database, since interim cadastral offices lack the necessary expertise to manage it locally. For this purpose, another application has been developed in-house to perform all spatial changes in the cadastral database in a standardized manner.
Documents issued by the Cadastre During the operation of the cadastre, the documents that are issued by the Cadastral Offices are the following: Copy of the cadastral sheet Certificate of the cadastral records of a real property Certificate of the cadastral records of a person Certificate of the registration of a deed Copy of the registered deed Copy of a document from the cadastral survey archive Extract of the cadastral map representing a particular real property Copy of a cadastral survey map (with field measurements) representing a particular real property
Current status-1 The first cadastral survey programmes (1996-1998) covered about 340 municipalities of the country regarding 8.400 km 2 and 6.5 million rights. For the operation of the Cadastre in these areas 97 interim Cadastral Offices have been established. The new cadastral survey program is underway concerning all the urban centers of the Country. The collection and registration of declarations has been completed. The final number of rights is estimated at about 8,5 million. Within the last 4 years, Ktimatologio S.A. has carried out a series of very important projects with European Commission co-financing, among them the following: Coverage of all the urban areas of the country with trueortho (fully orthorectified) imagery with 20 cm pixel size. Coverage of all the whole Country with orthoimagery of 50 cm pixel size
Current status -2 HEPOS: the Hellenic Positioning System a network of 98 permanent GPS stations throughout the Country, offering high precision measurements at a low cost. Development of the Greek implementation of ETRS and its transformation model with the existing Greek Geodetic System. Delineation of the forest areas of the country on recent and 1945 aerial photography Ortho imagery of 30cm pixel size and a detailed DTM covering all the coastline of the country. Preliminary delineation of the coastal zones. Development of one of the most powerful data centers in Greek public adminstration. Digitization of all the land consolidation acts of the Country
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