Possible negative legal impacts on cadastral work due to lack of perception on spatial uncertainty

Every measurement, modeling, and estimation procedure consists of uncertainty, and the uncertainty concept may not be understood in the same manner by all parts of society. The lack of uncertainty perception for cadastral activities and the resulting registries in the society, particularly legal experts and policymakers, has numerous consequences. Although the reality must come before the registers, legal entities consider the registers as facts. Recently, an
unexpected development about the registration of parcel area information has occurred in Europe and caused adverse effects on geospatial professionals and has a potential of producing unprecedented costs for the states. The parcel area information is one of the most frequently used attributes of a parcel in different domains, such as real estate finance, spatial planning, land development, land readjustment, expropriation, taxation, agricultural subsidies, land
regulations, land valuation, etc. Thus, the negative impacts of weak uncertainty perception in this domain have potential for diffusing to a wide range of application fields. In this paper, the shortcomings of insufficient spatial uncertainty perception by property right holders and legal experts are addressed based on a court decision made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2015. Cases from different countries, e.g. Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, etc., are discussed accordingly. The potential implications of the decision for geospatial professionals and real estate finance sectors are evaluated. The authors also consider that timely discussions and outreach activities on this subject are essential in the light of new land administration trends, such as 3D city models with various levels of details, urban digital twins, etc.