ePlan
ePlan Partnership Program (Land Use Victoria & CSDILA)
2016-2022
The ePlan Partnership program between Land Use Victoria (LUV) and CSDILA was officially launched in
June 2016.
This project aimed to modernise the Victorian land administration system (LAS) by conceptualising, designing, developing and maintaining a suite of innovative tools and services. The ePlan project developed the required infrastructure for creation, pre-lodgement validation, visualisation, and submission of spatially accurate digital cadastral data required by the Victorian land administration stakeholders for different purposes, such as map base adjustment and update, plan examination, land subdivision and development, asset/infrastructure/transport/disaster management and smart cities.
Project goal: conceptualise, design, develop and maintain a suite of innovative tools and services to support advanced land administration.
Partners: CSDILA within the Faculty of Engineering and IT, Land Use Victoria (LUV) within the former Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP)
In 2016, CSDILA was contracted to LUV within DELWP to provide technical expertise to advance and modernise the Victorian LAS. An initial 18 months engagement was followed by a further five-year partnership agreement launched in 2017.
Total funds for the partnership were over $6 million for the period 2016-2022.
Through the ePlan partnership, the CSDILA team successfully translated research findings into practice to address real-world problems.
ePlan contains all the information in a cadastral survey and subdivision plan including surveying measurements; land parcel description and identifiers; dimensions of the parcels and interests in land such as easements; administrative information on the subdivision; annotations; plan approval status; and the surveyors’ details.
ePlan benefits the Victorian LAS stakeholders because it:
- Provides a standard data exchange format for cadastral data sharing among stakeholders
- Provides a workflow for the exchange of digital cadastral data among stakeholders
- Enables stakeholders to re-use the existing digital cadastral data for different purposes, such as re-establishing subsequent surveys, updating databases and populating data into other systems
- Provides spatially accurate input data for updating the Digital Cadastre
- Provides the stakeholders with the spatially accurate cadastral data required for different applications such as planning, development, subdivision, asset management and disaster management
- Improves the quality of the cadastral plan and survey data through validation checks
- Standardises the presentation of cadastral plans through visualisation service
- Improves access to/delivery of cadastral and survey information
- Assists with improved digital plan examination/checking process
- Reduces errors, anomalies and requisitions in cadastral plans and surveys
- Improves cadastral plans examination and registration turnaround times.
Through the ePlan partnership, LUV achieved a major milestone in late 2021 in the progress toward 100 per cent digital cadastral lodgement with the launch of the ‘ePlan Portal ’ in SPEAR. According to the LUV website [link to be provided], embedding the ePlan Portal in SPEAR makes it world-leading: the first digital data-driven cadastral system that facilitates end- to-end processes when combined with the SPEAR Electronic Lodgement Network (ELN) as lawyers and conveyancers can electronically lodge ePlans in SPEAR to LUV for registration. This crucial new digital infrastructure is also the connecting piece with the Digital Cadastre Modernisation (DCM) program, enabling Victoria’s property boundary spatial data to be born-digital, breaking the current cycle of PDF digitisation.
The ePlan Portal (shown below) houses the suite of all ePlan services, as follows:
- Single CAD Format File (SCFF) Validation Service which ensures that the cadastral plan and survey data have been captured based on a standard co-designed with the surveying industry, namely SCFF. This service comprises 24 validation checks.
- SCFF Viewer which assists surveyors to address any non-compliance issues of SCFF by previewing the CAD features causing validation errors.
- ePlan Creation Service which converts SCFF into LandXML and pre-populates ePlan attributes from cadastral systems and databases, such as SPEAR, Vicmap, Survey Marks Enquiry Service and Surveyors Registration Board of Victoria. All pre- populated data can be reviewed and edited, and new data entered using an ePlan Editor. ePlan Validation Service which checks the completeness and correctness of the ePlan file against 130 rules covering schema compliance, surveying, and plan examination business requirements.
- ePlan Visualisation Enhancement Tool (VET) which enables surveyors to enhance plan presentation, particularly for heavily detailed and complex plans.
- ePlan Visualisation Service which converts the ePlan file along with any enhancements made in VET to a PDF plan. The PDF plan becomes the legal title diagram in Victoria when the plan is registered.
The ePlan partnership was successfully completed in July 2022 in accordance with the agreement and the outcomes have been transferred to LUV. We appreciate the contributions of the ePlan project team in delivering a world-class infrastructure for the lodgement and processing of digital subdivision plans in Victoria. Most especially, we acknowledge the efforts of Dr. Hamed Olfat, Farshad Badiee, and Afshin Mesbahmarjani who are now continuing their career journey at DELWP and progressing the project to its next phases.
Industrial partners
