IRISH INSTITUTE OF SURVEYORS, DUBLIN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 23 NOVEMBER 2005 PUBLISHED IN IIS NEWS, WINTHER 2006. The Digital Cadastral Database and the Role of the Private Licensed Surveyors in Denmark Stig Enemark Professor in Land Management, Aalborg University, Denmark President of the Danish Association of Chartered Surveyors Vice-President of FIG Introduction This article presents the cadastral system and the role of the private licensed surveyors in Denmark as a consideration for its relevance to the ongoing discussion in Ireland. Denmark and Ireland are comparable in many aspects. The countries are almost the same size in terms of area and population and the urban pattern as well as the rural land use is also equivalent. But the cadastral systems are quite different. Where the Irish system follows the UK model based on general boundaries and a land registry title system, the Danish system is based on fixed boundaries to identify the real properties in the cadastral system as a basis for entering the titles at the Land Registry at the local district courts. The cadastral register and the cadastral maps are maintained by the National Survey and Cadastre while the legal survey measurements and the boundary determinations are carried out by private licensed surveyors. The very heart of the Danish system is the interaction between the private licensed surveyors and the National Survey and Cadastre for maintaining the Digital Cadastral Data Base. This also relates to the increasing demand for improving the accuracy of the cadastral information as a basic layer for building the Geospatial Data Infrastructure of the future. The Danish Cadastral System The Danish cadastre, which derived from the results of the enclosure movement, was established in the year 1844. From the beginning the cadastre consisted of two parts; the cadastral register and the cadastral maps. Both of these components have been updated continually ever since. As a result of the enclosure movement, the former feudalistic society was changed into a society based on private ownership to land. The necessary maps were surveyed by plane table at a scale of 1:4,000. The resulting property framework from the enclosure movement formed the basis for the new cadastral maps. Each map normally includes a village and the