Determining the property ownership on cadastral works in Turkey.
Abstract The transformation process from state to civil ownership in Turkey was started at the end of the Ottoman Empire and continued until after the formation of Turkish Republic. In this process, in accordance with the Civil Code legislation, most land users who had been using state lands were regarded as owners of those lands. These parcels of real estate were used in various ways and it became necessary to register these properties by using a process called ‘written cadastre’. The initial process was slowed down during World War II but an intensive cadastral program was begun after the war in both urban and rural areas, particularly in 1950s. The cadastre work had two components called technical and legal. The definition of land ownership is the legal foundation of the cadastre. If properties have their titles, land ownership can be defined based on the title; otherwise the ownership can be defined according to statements by experts chosen from local people. However, without title or written evidence, determining the land ownership is more problematic. In this context, this study explains how the ownership of properties, with or without a title, is determined in cadastral work in Turkey.
Turkish cadastral system
Abstract In Turkey, cadastral works were started after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. These studies were carried out in such manner that ownership of the land was given to the people who were using it. Firstly, in 1924, the process was started in urban areas where one fourth of the total population of the country lived. Because of various problems including economic difficulties, technical deficiencies, personal insufficiencies, these cadastral works were only carried out in cities within the first 25 years from 1925 to 1950. Then the cadastral works were speeded up and most were carried out between 1950 and 1990. In this period, the work was achieved utilizing the available technology at that time in rural and urban areas. Today, 97% of the urban cadastral areas and 67% of the rural cadastral areas have been completed in Turkey. Generally, graphic, photogrammetric, orthogonal, and tachometric measurement methods have been used in this work. While 45% of the Turkish cadastral maps have been produced using graphic method which does not have a coordinate system, the other maps have been produced using the different measurement methods. These are also in different coordinate systems and scales. Only 7% of the whole cadastral maps are in digital format. On the other hand, because of the factors mentioned above, Turkish cadastral bases do not contain sufficient information to be converted to digital system in accordance with field. Since 1990, different methods have been used to digitize these non-digital cadastral maps. However, these attempts have failed. The main goals of this study are identifying historical background of cadastre and existing situation of it in Turkey.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.