Information about the book
Consider the term “the Third World.” Hernando de Soto, Peru’s leading free-market economist, says this image is both false and misleading. The ordinary peoples in the “undeveloped countries” of the world, in fact, have a vast amount of wealth. And this wealth enables a flourishing world of trade, commerce, industry, and employment.

The duty of land registration is to maintain and keep up-to-date Hungary’s only authentic inventory of land and property, which is a cardinal precondition of preserving the security of title and ownership rights guaranteed by the State.

After the political transformation, the role of land registration became more appreciated: at the same time this resulted in the extension of the duties of land registration offices. Namely, from 1990 on – first of all because of the compensation, privatisation, the redistribution of cooperative shares and selling of apartments owned by the local governments – the number of the landed and other real estates to be registered dramatically increased. Therefore, the modernisation of all technical and objective conditions of the existing paper based, manually managed land registry became vital.

In 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development (MARD) will start the implementation of a GIS project, which is partly financed by the PHARE programme and the Hungarian government. The overall objective of this project is to strengthen the land office network in order to cope with the challenges of the reinforcement of market economy through creating conditions for the development of land and real estate and the adoption of the relevant EU standards. The proposed project „META” is the last phase of the so-called TAKAROS technical conception and essential part of the approved strategy of the MARD on land management sector.

The modernisation process of the Hungarian land administration has reached a new phase. After developing the information technological infrastructure of land offices the country-wide access and service of land office data are becoming possible. Within the framework of the PHARE supported project “TAKARNET: Wide Area Network for the Land Offices of Hungary” the connection of the Hungarian land registration sector offices with each other and external users can be realised. The establishment of the TAKARNET network makes radical changes in the client service of the land offices, speeds up the processing time of applications, improves data and administration security, attends to a great number of users simultaneously, and in addition the network ensures more efficient communication and management information flow between district and county land offices, FÖMI and the Ministry.
The paper presents the TAKARNET concept in the mirror of the modernisation strategy of the land registration sector and analyses the new possibilities opened by establishing this network. Then a short overview is given about the network structure and the functions of the TAKARNET application software. Finally, in connection with the EU harmonisation, the implementation phases, main milestones are described which are on the way to create a National Land Information Service based on the TAKARNET infrastructure.