ISPRS, Vol.34, Part 2W2, “Dynamic and Multi-Dimensional GIS”, Bangkok, May 23-25, 2001 
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RESEARCH OF THE LAND MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM BASED ON WEB GIS AND 
SPATIAL DATABASES FOR PROVINCIAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN CHINA 
Junsan ZHA0 1) , Yaolong ZHAO 1 ’, Qiaogui ZHAO 2 ’ and Tao WEI 2 ’ 
(1 .Department of Land Information and Surveying Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650093, 
Yunnan, China. Tel: 86+871+5377063, Fax: 5377044, Email: izhao@vidgis.com. 2.Qiaogui Zhao, Tao Wei, Yunnan Bureau of Land and 
Resources Administration. Tel: 86+871+3116018) 
KEYWORDS : GIS/LIS, Web GIS, Land Management, Geospatial Database 
ABSTRACT: Over the past few years, government agencies at national, provincial and local levels have given much attention to the 
development and implementation of land management information system (LMIS). In this paper the functions, structures, key technologies 
and the methodologies of development of LMIS in China are described. By analyzing the up-to-date techniques of Web GIS and spatial 
DBMS, the state and local levels of modern land management information systems are designed. To assist in elaborating the methods of 
implementation of LMIS, a typical LMIS at county and state levels based on Maplnfo MapXtreme and Oracle 8i is introduced. 
INTRODUCTION 
Because all the procedures of land management depend on 
the geo-spatial information and are related to the laws, policies 
and rules, many modern techniques such as GIS/LIS, DBMS, 
computer science, Intranet/Internet technology, office 
automation (OA), and so forth must be applied to the 
development of LMIS (Coleman and McLaughlin 1998; Zhao 
1999). By use of the LMIS most of the daily work of land 
management can be accomplished efficiently, safely and 
successfully. Meanwhile LMIS could provide the richness of 
date/information to the government agencies for the 
decision-making and everyday management work. LMIS can 
also provide the services to other departments of the 
government agencies such as urban planning, facility 
management, tax collection, and so on (Land Victoria 1997;). 
China is the largest developing country in the world, and the 
conflict between land use and population is very serious. It is 
therefore technically difficult, but also very important socially, 
economically, environmentally and politically to manage land 
resources, land uses and land activities efficiently (Zhao 
1995,1998). 
The research and implementation of the LMIS based on the 
Web GIS, Intranet/Internet technology and spatial DBMS is in 
the trial stage in China. Up to now, only a few of LMISs are 
developed in some local government agencies in China. The 
reasons behind the difficulties of implementing the new LMIS 
include the following. Firstly, due to lacking of experiences 
combined with seeking to work at the level of advanced 
techniques, problems in the functionalities of software 
packages used for land data/information processing were 
encountered. Secondly, the data was in various formats in 
different systems. Thirdly, spatial data and land registration 
were still largely processed by manual systems. Last, but not 
the least, few LMISs had the abilities of the office automation 
and were based on the technology of Web GIS. 
This paper briefly describes the structures, functions and 
features of the new generation of LMIS. The technical 
difficulties of the development of LMIS are overviewed. To 
assist in elaborating the methods of development and 
implementation of LMIS, a typical LMIS based on Maplnfo 
MapXtreme and Oracle 8i is summarized. 
STRUCTURES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF LMIS 
LMIS in China has four levels, national, provincial, city, and 
county level LMIS (Zhao 1999). Each level of LMIS consists of 
subsystems of cadastral management, land use planning, land 
use management, document management, land use control, 
land inventory, etc. And the data/information of land 
management should be shared and transferred among different 
levels of LMIS. 
As all the other subsystems need to use the spatial and 
attribute data of cadastral, the cadastral management is the 
core of the LMIS. While LMIS is developed the following factors 
must be considered. First, the methods to get and process 
spatial data as well as attribute data, and ultimately create 
databases, must be studied. Second, the data flow; workflow 
and user’s requests of LMIS should be carefully analyzed. LMIS 
should meet the needs of office automation (OA), 
Intranet/Internet based and “without paper office in the 
departments of land management. Meanwhile, the systems 
should have the properties of user-friendly interfaces, and easy 
to use. Moreover, as the large quantities of land 
data/information, and changes to land use are very common, 
some technical difficulties to develop a successful LMIS are