Analogue data

Landownership circumstances have been recorded for hundreds of years, in writing and/or on plans. If the data exist on a plan, we refer to them as analogue data.

The legal basis for cadastral surveying came into being when the Swiss Civil Code entered into force in 1912. This legislation stipulated how data relating to landownership has to be collected and depicted, namely collected on site and sketched in the plan for the land register (formerly “land registry plan”). This means the data were available in analogue form.

Digital data

With the development of new technologies it became possible to constantly improve the quality of depiction of cadastral surveying data. In 1993, the legal basis was created for the digital recording and structuring of the data.
Here, the term “digital” refers to the fact that the data – coordinates and additional information – and corresponding surveying methods are entered, saved and processed in binary form (0/1).

This means that data are now collected digitally in the field and subsequently transferred to a geographic information system (GIS) in the office, so that they are available in digital form.

The advantages of digital data are a higher degree of accuracy and the possibility of using them as the basis for a broad variety of applications.