Washington: The World Bank approved a loan equivalent to US $ 203 million to the Government of Turkey for the Land Registry and Cadastre Modernization Project. The Project will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the land registry and cadastre services.

"The Project constitutes a next generation of Bank operations in the area of land management and cadastre, where the country already has a well functioning property rights regime, but is striving to take the land registry and cadastre data use to the next level by spreading its benefits to people, businesses and multiple sectors, and facilitating better access to real estate information through the e-government platform,” said Wael Zakout, Sector Manager and Task Team Leader for the Project. “This project will also help improve customer service by reducing the time taken to register a property transaction to a few hours, and develop property appraisal function in line with international standards.”

The project will (i) renovate and update cadastre maps to support digital cadastre and land registry information; (ii) make the digital land registry and cadastre information available to public and private entities (iii) improve customer services in land registry and cadastre offices; (iv) improve human resources in the Turkish Land Registry and Cadastre Agency (TKGM); and (v) develop policies and capacity to introduce best international practices in property valuation in Turkey.

While the Turkish Cadastre and Registration system is considered one of the most effective in the region and registration of property transactions is done within one day in many offices, there are still many shortcomings to be addressed to ensure that the system modernizes to reach the same service level as in the European countries. Many of the Cadastre and Land Registry offices rely on manual systems, with old documents, some of them dating back to the Ottoman times. In addition, the TAKBIS system (Turkey’s computerized Cadastre and Land Registry Software) runs in only 140 out of the 1000 offices.

The most challenging aspect is that cadastral maps continue to be in a paper format, vary in accuracy and consistency, and are not linked to the national network. This makes it difficult to support E-government applications as cadastre maps serve as a base mapping for many government applications. Furthermore, in many localities maps are out of date and do not correspond with the ground locations and areas, differing sometimes by up to 10 meters.

The project will be funded by an IBRD flexible variable spread loan. It will have a maturity of 23.5 years including a 5 year grace period.

Cartosat-2A images presented to PM
	High quality imageries acquired from Cartosat-2A and Indian Mini Satellite-1 (IMS-1) were presented to the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at Delhi by Dr G Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO along with a team of senior scientists. It may be recalled that Cartosat-2A and IMS-1 were successfully launched by PSLV-C9 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota on April 28, 2008.

The cameras on board Cartosat-2A and IMS-1 were turned on subsequently and the imageries have been acquired over India and many parts of the globe.

The Prime Minister was highly appreciative of the success of the PSLV-C9 mission which placed 10 satellites into orbit. He congratulated the entire team for the magnificent performance.

The Prime Minister was also briefed about ISRO’s missions of the immediate future like Chandrayaan-1 and new initiatives related to the Manned Spaceflight Programme. The Prime Minister wished ISRO team success in all its future endeavours.

The Global Wildlife Disease News Map, developed jointly by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the US Geological Survey, can be accessed at http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov

Updated daily, the map displays pushpins marking stories of wildlife diseases such as West Nile virus, avian influenza, chronic wasting disease, and monkeypox. Users can browse the latest reports of nearly 50 diseases and other health conditions, such as pesticide and lead poisoning, by geographic location. Filters make it easy to focus on different disease types, affected species, countries, and dates.

The map is a product of the Wildlife Disease Information Node (WDIN), a five-year-old collaboration between UW-Madison and two federal agencies, the National Wildlife Health Center and the National Biological Information Infrastructure, that are part of the US Geological Survey (USGS). WDIN is housed within the university's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the USGS.

A powerful feature of the wildlife disease map is its ability to tap into the WDIN's large and growing electronic library of information from around the globe.

"If you click on the name of a particular disease, it takes you to our main Web site and does a quick search of everything that we have on that topic," says Cris Marsh, a librarian who oversees the wildlife disease news services for the WDIN.

State and federal wildlife managers, animal disease specialists, veterinarians, medical professionals, educators, and private citizens will all find the new map useful for monitoring wildlife disease, adds Marsh.

Produced by WDIN staffer Megan Hines, the map is the latest addition to a suite of tools aimed at keeping users abreast of wildlife disease news. The WDIN gathers news from more than 20 on-line sources and makes it available in a number of handy formats, from a Wildlife Disease News Digest at wdin.blogspot.com to desktop widgets, e-mail, and RSS feeds. Subscription information for these news delivery services can be found at http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov/wdindigest.html.

Ultimately, the WDIN seeks to provide a comprehensive on-line wildlife disease information warehouse, according to project leader Josh Dein, a veterinarian with the Madison-based USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

"People who collect data about wildlife diseases don't currently have an established communication network, which is something we're working to improve," says Dein. "But just seeing what's attracting attention in the news gives us a much better picture of what's out there than we've ever had before."

Concerns about the emergence and spread of diseases that can pass between species have forged new links in recent years between wildlife health, human health, and domestic animal health professionals.

"It all ties in together, the 'One-World, One-Health' idea," says Marsh. "The West Nile virus acted as one of the catalysts for that connection. People in different areas in the eastern U.S. began to see isolated incidences of dead and dying crows that seemed abnormally high, but nobody knew other areas were experiencing the same thing."

Because West Nile virus also affects humans and other mammals, it became apparent to scientists that disease outbreaks of this kind need to be addressed as quickly as possible, explains Marsh. Outbreaks of monkeypox and highly pathogenic avian influenza soon afterward underscored the importance of linking information about emerging diseases across all species.

"If scientists share with one another the information they're collecting on the patterns of diseases like these, we can respond to outbreaks much more efficiently," says Marsh.

Besides providing news services, WDIN collaborates with a wide variety of public and private entities to gather and provide access to important wildlife disease data. Because of the global significance of these diseases, WDIN encourages others to become involved with the project.

"The more information we can link," says Marsh, "the more robust our service becomes.

Wayland, Mass.: The buildingSMART alliance, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Testbed issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed. The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the United States National Building Information Modelling Standard, Part 1 (NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent building models with 3D geometric capabilities. Business and communications, quantity take-off for cost estimating and energy analysis are considered as they relate to planning and design for a capital facility. These three topic areas were selected by the Sponsors to focus attention on defining workable information solutions and services for information visualisation and sharing.

The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects /initiatives/aecoo-1rfq. Responses are due by May 30, 2008.

All organizations and individuals with expertise in the building information management field are encouraged to review and respond to the RFQ / CFP. Limited cost-sharing funding is available to help offset engineering costs incurred by participants in support of this effort.

Effective management of buildings and other capital facilities increasingly requires information exchange among all disciplines and professions that have a stake in the design, construction and operation of those facilities. Numerous information exchange approaches have been developed independently within the community. Understanding how particular exchanges and related technology might best support AECOO end-to-end business practices is a high priority for the industry.

The buildingSMART alliance and OGC decided that OGC's Interoperability Program is the right mechanism to encourage broad international participation in solving well-defined sets of AECOO community problems; facilitating cooperation among AECOO standards bodies; and achieving results no group could achieve alone.

The AECOO Testbed is an Interoperability Initiative that features a global, hands-on and collaborative rapid prototyping program designed to develop and deliver proven candidate standards into OGC's, NBIM's and buildingSMART International's specification programs where they are formalized for release as open standards. In Interoperability Initiatives, teams of technology providers and users collaborate to solve specific interoperability problems posed by the Initiatives' sponsors. Interoperability Initiatives can be test beds, pilot projects, or interoperability experiments, all designed to encourage rapid development, testing, validation and adoption of open, consensus based standards.

buildingSMART International and its National Chapters and the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) including its buildingSMART alliance and National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) Project have large roles in the ultimate success of this testbed. It is through these organizations that results of the testbed will be delivered.