Unified Land Record System

The ULRS and Address Integration systems enable better communication between City departments and easier, more reliable access to land records.

Client: City of Philadelphia, Mayor’s Office of Information Services

Challenge: Philadelphia’s various City agencies all maintain property data in multiple formats, including different forms of addresses. While each individual system works well for the department that uses it, this mismatch created an obstacle for sharing and integrating data across departments.

Solution: The Unified Land Records System (ULRS) was created to enable the disparate data systems of the major land record agencies to operate together with the City’s GIS. The initial phase of development focused on the creation of a seamless map layer of real estate parcels. Avencia developed an Address Integration system to integrate the parcel layer with other important geographic data, including the various forms of address, land title records and tax accounts. The Address Integration system operates side-by-side with the base parcel layer to accomplish several goals, including address standardization. Software components are able to accept poorly formatted addresses, recognize common street aliases and abbreviations, spell-check against a street dictionary, and reformat addresses into the standardized format. In addition to a geographic processing engine, the ULRS includes a problem tracking system, a data explorer that presents a unified view of the City’s land records, a street aliasing dictionary, and a set of XML-based Web Services that enable ULRS data to integrated into other software projects.

Outcomes: The Address Integration system efficiently addresses the inconsistency of data between departments, establishing a robust, accessible infrastructure for providing comprehensive data services. The ULRS Web Services are now integrated into several City software projects, bringing access to integrated land record data for the Revenue Department, Licenses and Inspections, the Police Department and others,and lowering the cost of delivering new services.

Publications:
ESRI Special Achievement in GIS Award