Nederlanders: When was the BAG established, and how was the dataset created? That must have been an incredible collection/standardization/digitization project.
Basically whenever a house is sold, (I never actually bought a house so someone more knowledgeable should correct me) information about the purchase and the state of the house is submitted to the Kadaster. As far as I know the kadaster is something that has its roots in the middle ages, but I could be mistaken.
As for the digitization, that probably happened somewhere in the late 60's early 70's out of necessity along with many other governmental databases (like taxes).
What is news is that one apparently can query the entire kadaster database, this is something done by http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/, a European project so maybe we'll get info like this from other countries as well.
I know some municipalities maintain extensive GIS and financial datasets that include valuation, sale data, ownership, maps, etc. Here's an example from the Boston assessor's database: http://www.cityofboston.gov/assessing/search/?pid=0503500000
But I don't know if smaller/poorer towns have created or maintain digital archives, what standards are used, or whether data is shared at the county or state level. One question I have: Is this a state or local requirement that such records are created and posted online, and how does it differ from municipality to municipality and state to state?
I would be surprised if a federal agency maintained a national database like the Netherlands, although these days it's not really clear what data our government is gathering/sharing, and for what sorts of purposes.
The land registry is woefully incomplete. Things only get into the registry when there's a change of ownership, and some land has been in the same family since the Domesday book. This was a problem when I used to work on software processing planning applications as some councils thought they could use the land registry to validate addresses.
The planning applications had great data in them if it could be opened up (eg they are generally submitted with a property boundary map!) but generally the councils wanted to either monetize this data or not release it at all; so you just get pdfs&metadata out, even when the user submitted in a vector format.
2. 'Kadaster' is dutch for the English 'cadastre' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadastre)
3. The Dutch cadastre was initiated in 1811, by decree from Napoleon Bonaparte (the Netherlands was part France at the time). First ?complete? set was available in 1832 (http://www.kadaster.nl/web/Themas/themaartikel/dossierartike...; in Dutch)
No, instead we have a very limited series of copyright-protected maps by a company called Sanborn that was hired to do this style map from 1867 to 2007 for fire insurance companies - but not in every town and city, not regularly, and rarely for rural areas.
On top of that we have 3100 county-like bodies which will each tend to have a local plat map of who owns which properties (which will occasionally mark buildings), in varying stages of digitization and privatization (some of them charge ridiculous amounts, some are public access).
We also have an irregularly updated USGS quad dataset that is not very precise, and doesn't attempt either building shape or urban areas.
Lastly, there are modern aerial-collection LIDAR returns that tend to produce high accuracy building corner references.
Source: Dutch Wikipedia http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basisregistraties_Adressen_en_G...