Welcome back and congratulations to all that managed through my last lengthy blog post, answering questions around our “Unlocking Sasines” investigation.

Trust me – this one will be shorter but get that strong coffee ready just in case!

So, this quick blog is all about our progress in the last month with the “part 1” tease in the title suggesting a “cliff-hanger” ending of more to come…

There’s a quick overview in my last blog but if you don’t want to read that then the summary of the summary is – while we continue to complete the Land Register, we intend in parallel, to make the Sasine Register easier to search by linking an indicative ownership spatial extent to search sheets”. Or if I were allowed to, I’d call it “Putting Sasines on the Map.”TM

We are in a prototyping phase ‘til around the end of the year. With the amazing Fiona McKie working with stakeholders and data owners while building an amazing team to deliver the work.

I have also been working with several similarly amazing teams (that’s a lot of amazing’s Alan) across RoS looking at the mechanics of getting, validating, analysing and storing the data.

What are the current prototype experiments I hear you all cry?

• Find varied landowners and public bodies interested in providing data
• Create a robust and reusable data sharing agreement (sounds important!)
• Find ways to transfer, transform and store provided data safely in the spatial ‘data hopper’
• Look at key performance indicators, analysis, validation and visualisation methodologies of the supplied data (sounds clever!)
• Next, the big one, find methods to use the provided data to manually link ownership extents back to a Sasine search sheet (sounds hard!)
• Finalise manual processing end-to-end including rejection criteria

These experiments will provide information on potential demand, confidence on how the process will work, and crucially where bottlenecks may lie as we look to productionise the process in 2021.

So, onto the cliff hanger ….

Will we get enough data for the prototype?

How time consuming will the manual searching be?

Will we get diagrams next time?

Crucially, will Alan ever be allowed to do another blog?

Join us in ‘Unlocking the Sasine: part 2’ to find out!