Article Quantifying the Overlap between Cadastral and Visual Boundaries: A Case Study from Vanuatu Xianghuan Luo 1, Rohan Bennett 2,* ID , Mila Koeva 3 ID , Christiaan Lemmen 4 ID and Nathan Quadros 5 1 Department of Land Surveying and Geo-informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China;
[email protected] 2 Swinburne Business School, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne 3122, Australia 3 Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede 7522 NB, The Netherlands;
[email protected] 4 Netherlands Cadastre Land Registry and Mapping Agency, Kadaster International, Apeldoorn 7300GH, The Netherlands;
[email protected] 5 CRC for Spatial Information, Carlton University, Victoria 3053, Australia;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +61-3-9214-4991 Received: 31 October 2017; Accepted: 13 November 2017; Published: 16 November 2017 Abstract: Cadastres are argued as an essential tool to support land tenure security. Low cadastral coverage in developing countries creates a driver for innovative methods to expedite the mapping processes. As a human construct, the morphology of parcel boundaries is a diverse and complex topic: there are limited generalized rules for identifying, describing, and classifying them. This paper studies both the institutional and spatial aspects of cadastral boundaries, in order to provide more contemporary knowledge about the morphology of cadastral boundaries. This study inspects the relationship between topographic objects and general boundaries in the case context of Port Vila, Vanuatu. Statistical analysis reveals that under a dialectical error tolerance, large percentages of cadastral boundaries coincide with topographic objects.