Help for Cadastral Electronic Site (SEC)

SEC reduces the number of visits to cadastre offices by 20 % and saves 25.000 working days and attention time.

The Spanish cadastre is an administrative register with a fiscal origin, created as a data bank to be accessed both by Public Administrations (national, regional, local) and citizens. As an inventory of real estate, it contains physical information (surfaces, location, use, shape, boundaries, cartographic representation, crops and forest use, type and quality of constructions, etc.), legal information (identification of holders or owners: name, national identification number, address, etc.) and economic information (cadastral values of land and buildings, valuation criteria). This cadastral bank includes detailed information of more than 32 million urban properties, more than 40 million rural properties and more than 27 million cadastral owners.

The Cadatral Electronic Site started up in May 2003 with the main goal of providing other Administrations with information which, up to that moment, citizens were requested to present in the suitable office after collecting it themselves from the cadastral office. At the moment, the Cadatral Electronic Site provides the following services:

  • Request for cadastral information, both alphanumeric and graphic (maps). This service allows to look up the physical and economic features of properties as well as their owner. The data can be obtained from the location (address) of a building, from its cadastral reference or code, or from a list of the properties owned by a person.
  • Massive request service. Instead of making individual queries, it is possible to send a file in a predefined format with necessary data and this service replies with all the requested information in a file.
  • Certificate of the cadastral data (official document with the data obtained from a previous request). This document is obtained immediately and at no cost. The validity of this document is based on a code of 16 characters printed in the document itself, which, once typed in one of the options of the application, allows to recover the document as it was originally issued.
  • Exchange of information: It allows to exchange files, with a predefined format, between Cadastre and the different Administrations as well as with other collaborating organizations, with different purposes: coordination of the contents of data bases, updating of Cadastral information, legal effects, taxation, etc.

It is important to emphasize that all these services are provided at no cost, and have a universal nature. Nevertheless, as both the European Union and Spanish laws consider part of the cadastral data as protected data, access to these protected data of real estate is legally accessible only by certain institutions and administrations and, of course, by the owners of each particular property. Therefore the identification of the applicants is a most important subject . For that reason, involved administrations have to be registered off-line in the application and, once registered, they are obliged to use X509 digital certificates in order to authenticate the users. Owners of a particular property can access protected data of their own properties by authenticating themselves with a X509 digital certificate.

The General Directorate of the Cadastre has reached agreements with different Certification Authorities to admit the X509 certificates issued by them as mechanisms of authentication in the application.

Description of services

Basically, two kind of services are provided:

  • Request and certification of cadastral data.
  • Massive exchange of information.

Services of request and certification of cadastral data:

They allow locating a specific property in three different ways:

  • Typing province, municipality, street name and number in case of urban buildings; province, municipality, polygon and parcel in the case of rural properties.
  • Selecting it in the cadastral cartography.
  • Typing the holder's National Identification Number (NIF), and selecting a property from the list of properties owned by that person.

Once located or selected the property, the information provided by the program is as follows:

  • Previously registered users, as owners of a particular property (legally authorized, with a personalized access), can obtain thorough information of this property: physical characteristics, cartography, bordering properties (ownership) and economic data (cadastral values). This information can be certified by obtaining a code of 16 characters which guarantees this document is valid, since at any time the original document issued by the SEC can be recovered just by typing this code in the SEC form.
  • Free access users (not authenticated), can obtain all the cadastral information except economic values and ownership of the property.

It is important to emphasize that any particular citizen who identifies by a X509 certificate issued by one of the CA's recognized by the General Directorate of the Cadastre, can view all the accesses made on their properties by all administrations and institutions as registered users in the SEC.

Massive exchange of information Services

Cadastre exchanges a huge amount of information with collaborating agents in order to coordinate the contents of their respective data bases. These SEC services allow the exchange of data files between collaborating agents and the Cadastre via Internet. The users have the following competence:

  • To send files to other users, via Internet, generating warnings to the receiver. - To obtain immediate information about the syntactic validity of data of the sent files, giving the possibility, in case of errors, to provoke a reverse gear in the process of information shipment.
  • To download received files sent by other users, being able to recognize the sender previously, type of file and dates of shipment.
  • To view statistics about sent and received files.

Project values and results

The basic functions of the cadastral Information are the following:

  • It provides the different Public Administrations with information for the tributary management of different taxes based on the real estate property.
  • It provides security to the real estate sale procedure. It is compulsory to include the cadastral code of the properties in deeds and registry inscriptions, in order to complement the legal information of the registry of the property, with physical and economic data of the cadastre.
  • It is a data bank at the service of citizens and Public Administrations, that use cadastral information for management of their policies of territorial planning (such as town planning or infrastructures), for the control of public aids and subsidies (such as scholarships, social aids, Common Agriculture Policy, etc.), or for planning services of utility companies (networks of telephony, gas, electricity, cable, etc.).
  • Finally, cadastre is usually requested to provide evidence in court.

When gathering all this information in an accessible Internet service, always taking into account security and data protecting policies the following values are achieved:

  • It enables to issue cadastral information, avoids inconveniences of citizens going to the Cadastre offices to obtain the needed data. In addition, this information is obtained at no cost.
  • It enables to fulfill legal obligations of the citizens, eliminating unnecessary proceedings and streamlining procedures.
  • It eliminates most routine and tedious work in the departments of public attention of the cadastre offices.
  • It reinforces the exchange of information with administrations and institutions collaborating with Cadastre.
  • It reinforces and improves the opinion of the citizens on Public Administration.
  • It promotes the electronic administration, the e-government.

The main results of the Cadatral Electronic Site at October 2006 are the following:

  • REGISTERED USERS: 40.500
  • DATA DIFFUSION
    • Started in May 2003 with only descriptive information (not cartography)
    • Carthography in October 2004
    • 3.3 Mill. Certifications (50% CDG)
    • 8.1 Mill. Protected data requests
    • 58 Mill. Non-protected data requests
    • 112 Mill. Cartography requests
  • DATA EXCHANGE
  • Started in September 2003
  • 125.000 files received from notaries and land registers (15.5 Mill. Records)
  • 36.000 files interchanged with authorities of municipalities and state and regional government

The SEC is adapted to the EU Directives

The Cadatral Electronic Site is fully adapted to the 2003//98/EC Directive, on the re-use of public sector information. Presently, it even includes numerous elements which will be regulated in the Proposal for a Directive establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE).