Regarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given property.
There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit a small number of people equipped to exploit them.
I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.
Working with landmen and title companies in Texas has taught me that even the best kept computer GIS records are probably wrong. This goes for regular property as well as mineral leasing. The amount of records for one sublease are simply staggering. We are currently doing a digitizing and OCR of historical well records from 1980 to current and the amount of paperwork fills a 40x30 storage building ceiling to floor. This is only for a few thousand wells. I've seen title searches for large families where there wasn't a will set up end up with a sack of near 1000 printed pages. Detangling property rights in areas with a lot of history, and mineral rights separated from land rights is a damned nightmare.
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Regarding GIS data specifically, the first thing I thought of was a story from a friend how owns a gas well in rural West Virginia. There's a framework for determining who owns the rights to extract gas at a given depth on a given property.
There are engineering-based ways to cheat the system (oops! there's totally accidentally a hole in my well above the depth where I have the right to extract gas) but the thing that struck me about her story was how bad all the basic county record keeping was. People die, mineral rights (and other property) need to be handled by the court, and ambiguities or errors on the record of who owns what where that might have easily been corrected when people were still alive become a matter of dispute, and some are a lot better equipped than others to legally deal with that kind of dispute. Her complaints had more to do with an obviously corrupt method of informing interested parties of things like auctions, whose inefficiencies always seemed to benefit a small number of people equipped to exploit them.
I'm sure someone with more experience with real property could give lots of examples. My experience is more with county court systems, and I just assume that if counties haven't computerized their criminal and civil records - which is dead simple, conceptually - they haven't got around to implementing relatively more sophisticated GIS systems. Maybe I'm wrong.
Working with landmen and title companies in Texas has taught me that even the best kept computer GIS records are probably wrong. This goes for regular property as well as mineral leasing. The amount of records for one sublease are simply staggering. We are currently doing a digitizing and OCR of historical well records from 1980 to current and the amount of paperwork fills a 40x30 storage building ceiling to floor. This is only for a few thousand wells. I've seen title searches for large families where there wasn't a will set up end up with a sack of near 1000 printed pages. Detangling property rights in areas with a lot of history, and mineral rights separated from land rights is a damned nightmare.