LIXItech

Great minds think alike

This news update was just emailed to NECS stakeholders:

"Industry and jurisdiction stakeholders alike will be interested in a recent development in the UK.

The UK Land Registry, custodian of the world’s largest land register with almost 18 million titles registered, has announced that it has signed up as a member of the e-business standards body PISCES (Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard) as part of its commitment to electronic conveyancing  PISCES Ltd is a not-for-profit body similar to LIXI Ltd and has been involved in developing and publishing a wide range of electronic data transfer standards for the property industry in the UK and Europe over the past ten years.

The UK Land Registry has been working towards an electronic conveyancing solution since 2002 and its Director of Information Systems, John Wright, noted in the announcement that “PISCES is one of the key drivers behind the adoption of open e-business standards for the property industry, enabling it (ie the industry) to function more effectively and efficiently.”

Like the partnership between LIXI and NECS, the UK Land Registry sees its involvement with PISCES, of which many of its customers are members, as benefiting the development of electronic conveyancing and in particular integration of its systems with industry systems to achieve straight-through processing of conveyancing transactions.

The announcement can be viewed at http://www.landreg.gov.uk/about_us/pressoffice/notices/default.asp?article_id=17192 and details of PISCES are available at http://web.pisces.co.uk/public/about.aspx?ID=1."

If you'd like to know more about Australia's electronic conveyancing initiative you can check out the NECS website. LIXI members who'd like to know more about how the LIXI/NECS collaboration is going can take a look here.

Electronic Conveyancing

The next NECDS Working Group meeting is on this coming Monday (Nov. 19). This will be the first meeting that is open to all LIXI members, not just the various land registries. It will be interesting to see if anyone new turns up - I've heard a lot of opinions expressed over the past few months about how electronic conveyancing can and should work, so I wonder how much of that will translate into actual constructive involvement...

NECS steps

Pardon the pathetic pun. Couldn't resist it.

As I mentioned a few posts back, the LIXI Working Group on electronic conveyancing data standards (the NECS Working Group) will be open to all LIXI members from the WG's next meeting. I suggested that anyone interested in participating should make sure they read all the background doco from the NECS site but there's one more document you really should read. Download necs_requirements_definition_v5_060607.pdf This doesn't have "official" status yet and can be expected to change over time but it's well worth taking the time to read carefully.

If you do happen to read it carefully, and not fall asleep halfway through, I can guarantee you'll be one of the better informed people at the next WG meeting :-) I often find a glass of red can really help when faced by a daunting document, but there's something about the NECS doco that seems to require whole bottles...

Electronic Conveyancing - it's time to get involved

LIXI and NECO (the National Electronic Conveyancing Office) have been collaborating to develop the message standards needed to support a national electronic conveyancing system. A NECDS (National Electronic Conveyancing Data Standards) Working Group has been established just like any other LIXI working group and online requirements documentation is evolving rapidly in Pageseeder. The difference to date has been that the Working Group has been limited to representatives from the various State and Territory land registries. This hasn't been because there are any big secrets involved - we* just wanted to get established before we invite all and sundry to join in (in other words, we wanted to get to the point where we look like we know what we are doing :-) ).

Anyhow, from the next NECDS Working Group meeting onwards all LIXI members will be welcome to come along to observe and contribute their thoughts on how the various message standards should look. This is a great opportunity for the people who will eventually have to use NECS (i.e. you lot) to both learn about how it will work and to make sure that how it works fits with how they want it to work.

I do strongly suggest, however, that you read up thoroughly on the background documentation before you try to join the conversation. There is a lot available to read and I guarantee that 9 out of 10 questions you may have can be answered from the doco. Check out the documentation section of the NECS website for a cornucopia of informative reading matter.

If you are interested in participating you can go into Pageseeder to subscribe yourself to the NECS Working Group mailing list. That way you will automatically be notified when we schedule the next WG meeting.

* I'm saying "we" here because I'm the NECDS Working Group convener - Barry.

NECDS

For those not in the know, NECDS stands for National Electronic Conveyancing Data Standards i.e. the data standards required to support NECS, the National Electronic Conveyancing System. These standards are being developed as a joint effort by NECS, the various State land registries, and LIXI. This is an important project for many reasons, but from LIXI's perspective one of the biggest reasons for being involved is to ensure that we end up with a common language for the entire loan process "from soup to nuts". The ultimate goal is to enable data such as a borrower's name in the loan application to be re-used, across multiple systems without having to be re-entered, all the way through to creating and lodging the mortgage.

Anyhow...today we had the second meeting of the NECDS Working Group and I'm happy to say we're genuinely getting a lot done. While trying to come up with a single standard to talk to eight different State and Territory land registries looks scary complicated at first the parallels with the process we went through to create LIXI CAL are very strong. By which I mean that once you've resolved the naming differences the underlying data set is both simpler and more universal than it looked to start with.

I'll admit I'm probably a little odd in the head, but I really enjoy big, juicy problems like NECDS. In comparison work like, for instance, the AML mods to CAL just isn't as engaging. Unquestionably important, but relatively administrative with little room or need for creativity.