Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
signed by the judge, the inscription itself is presumed valid only until proof
of the contrary. Thus, although parties rely primarily on the contents of
the registers during the ordinary course of business, it is the
ordonnance
that serves as evidence in case of conflict.
For all its qualities, the system showed increasing signs of strain in the
context of the increased complexity of urban real estate and rapid rates at
which property is nowadays exchanged. Electronic tools seemed obvious
candidates to overcome both the physical limitations of the
feuillets
and
the slow and tedious process of transcription. Discussed since the 1980s,
the computerization of the registry began in earnest in 1994 with the
creation of a specifically dedicated administrative body, the
Groupement
pour l'Informatisation du Livre Foncier d'Alsace-Moselle
(GILFAM). Its charter
specifies that the goal of computerization of the land registry is to “facili-
tate and speed up the process of requests for new inscriptions, automate
information exchange between the registry and the cadastre, optimize
information storage and enable remote consultation of the register.”
Funded by a special tax levied on all real estate transactions, in 2002 the
GILFAM awarded IBM and a consulting firm a €60 million contract to
oversee and implement the computerization of the registry. The project
was a flagship one for IBM, featured in its 2003 annual report as an example
of “the integration of technology and law in effective e-government.”
Noting that business process reengineering, technology development, and
legislative adaptation had proceeded hand in hand, the report noted
that “the model can apply to governments everywhere as they transform
themselves to become on demand.”
41
Computerized Version
The computerization began in earnest with the transcription of the con-
tents of 40,000 registers into structured data, a considerable technical and
organizational challenge. After preprocessing all registers to increase their
legibility, all 2.5 million
feuillets
were digitized using a custom high-speed
page-turning scanning apparatus. The resulting TIFF files were transferred
to Madagascar for transcription, a three-year process requiring a team of
one hundred data entry operators
—
for quality-control purposes, two data-
entry operators transcribed each page of the register. Because of the cost,
only active entries were transcribed, with inactive entries remaining avail-
able through the scanned images of the register.
