Acess
Survey Plan Online Checker (SPOC)
Overview – SPOC Modernization 2020
Survey Plan Online Checker (SPOC) is a geospatial web MAP application that allows Alberta land surveyors to verify that their survey plan meets Alberta Land Title specifications before submitting applications for approval to Alberta’s Land Titles Office (LTO).
Business Challenge
Due to reduced budgets at Service Alberta in 2009, Alberta Land Titles Office (LTO) resources were drastically reduced, strengthening the desire for efficiencies from a digital workflow. LTO wanted a system to assist them in checking digital CAD files submitted for plan registration, performing a series of automated checks to verify a CAD file complies with submission specifications, including having appropriate CAD layers, geo-referencing, and dimension annotation. Since the CAD file is the source for the survey plan to be registered, checking the CAD file results in higher quality survey plans.
Solution
We developed Survey Plan Online Checker (SPOC), a custom geo-processing service that imports a CAD file and performs various business rule checks to validate its contents and formatting and then provides a package that is ready for submission to the LTO.
SPOC provides a means to perform layer checks to ensure the CAD files adhere to the required layer specifications thereby allowing LTO staff to focus on document registration rather than checking digital CAD files. There are three essential quality assurance functions:
- A layer content check provides the user with an acknowledgement that the submitted CAD file meets the required layer and element structure;
- The CAD file is processed through a geo-referencing quality check tool to ensure the CAD file is geo-referenced accurately and is consistent with the legal land description, projection and datum specified in the metadata; and
- A dimension check whereby line lengths are compared with their associated annotated dimension text.
Once these checks are complete, and if the file has met the quality requirements, it is uploaded to a map viewer. The user is then able to view their plan relative to the Alberta cadastral fabric to ensure the survey plan has been drawn in the correct spatial location. Once this has been verified, an email will be automatically returned to the user with the required files for Land Titles. It is a mandatory government requirement that all digital survey plans that are registered at Alberta Land Titles be processed by the SPOC application.
In January 2010, the Director of Surveys mandated that all plans submitted to LTO for plan registration were to be geo-referenced. All files are now processed through SPOC and verified that the digital CAD file is geo-referenced according to LTO requirements.
Benefits
- Improved Quality: All files processed through SPOC are verified that the digital CAD file is geo-referenced according to Director of Surveys requirements.
- Visual Checks For Users: A surveyor can view their plan relative to the complete and current cadastral fabric for Alberta and enables them to identify plan anomalies or conflicts prior to submission.
- Faster Approvals: The digital workflow helps streamline the approval process and improves the overall quality of the registration documents.
- Reduced Effort: LTO staff can focus their efforts on registering documents instead of verify files match submission requirements.
- More Secure: The system compresses and encrypts the surveyors digital plan package making it secure; only LTO staff can extract the information in this package for plan registration purposes.
- More Information: Meta data fields regarding the CAD file, such as the survey method and datum to assist in the registration and mapping process, are also captured by the system.
- Reduced Errors and Costs: By identifying survey plan errors prior to plan registration, there is the potential cost savings of more than $2,000 per plan and helps improve the reliability and confidence in the land registration process.
