Property details available on new website

By CHRIS BARTON

It feels as if big brother is overhead.

Type in your street address at eMap (click on "from the air") and there it is - an aerial photograph of your house and section, showing the boundaries, the road and all your neighbours' houses.

It's quite up to date, too, because the roof is freshly painted and you only did that last year.

The demonstration service is the first fruit of Terralink International - a company formed out of the receivership sale of Government mapmaker Terralink and the talents of New Zealand Aerial Mapping and Animation Research, which bought it for $7.2 million.

eMap is significant because it shows the potential of Terralink's hidden assets - something the Government failed to see when it wound up the state-owned enterprise in January last year, having refused it a cash bailout after its $2.6 million dispute with information technology multinational EDS.

More significant is that eMap has delivered in a remarkably short time public internet access to property information - something the Government's delay-plagued $150 million-plus Landonline project has yet to do. The full eMap service will launch towards the end of this year.

The irony will not be lost on officials as it was Landonline delays and cost overruns that ultimately caused Terralink's demise.

Terralink was a subcontractor to EDS for the task of converting the country's survey plans to a new digital format. When the job got behind, Terralink was hit with penalty payments of $300,000 to $600,000 a month.

Terralink director and head of Animation Research Ian Taylor downplays the comparisons, although he does acknowledge that eMap may one day compete with Landonline.

He points out that much of the geographic information underlying eMap comes directly from Land Information New Zealand's existing electronic databases and uses Landonline data as it becomes available.

The key difference between systems is that eMap begins with aerial photographs, whereas Landonline begins with survey plans - the difference between "the real world and the cadastral world".

As Mr Taylor says, the real world approach has many advantages.

It shows what is there on the ground - actual roads and boundaries, not paper ones, real entrances to properties, and other distinctive features such as vegetation and landmarks.

Using specialised stereo viewing equipment, Terralink is also able to build up a layer of land contour information directly from the photographs. The technique has been used to good effect for a Terralink mapping project in Portugal and for creating golf and rally course flyovers for TV graphics supplied by Animation Research.

Any amount of other land data such as valuations, legal descriptions, utility services, plus surrounding amenities and facilities, can be overlaid on the photograph as a "viewing layer" that can be turned on or off.

Mr Taylor sees eMap as the start of a living, ever-expanding database of land information in New Zealand and favours a cooperative rather than competitive approach to building up the resource.

As well as providing layers of geographic data for existing Terralink clients such as councils and utilities to keep track of assets and properties and provide better information to customers, eMap has a range of other applications that are just beginning to emerge.

Fencing contractors, for example, can use its measuring tool to accurately quote boundary fencing contracts, real estate agents can use it to describe a property's selling features such as distance from the beach or other amenities.

The service also has a route calculation feature which shows how to get from A to B, useful in tourist and transport applications.

The visually accurate information could also prove invaluable to emergency services.

Project manager Megan Senior says that because the service is entirely accessible through the internet, eMap provides geographic information systems (GIS) for rent.

"The big difference here is that GIS departments can have access to land information without having pay for expensive GIS software."

eMap is built on Smallworld GIS data management software - developed by GIS specialist Mike Bundock, who is also a director of Terralink.

Ms Senior says eMap can also be integrated into customers' existing GIS databases and can be used on handheld or portable devices.

eMap with aerial photography is available now on Auckland city and North Shore, New Plymouth, Christchurch and Dunedin.

eMap