The Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water (NRW) are in the process of implementing the ePlan Protocol for the transfer of Cadastral Survey Data.

The Department has a program of work called the EARL Initiative to implement the protocol. The program has been divided into 3 major projects
• EARL I called Survey Information Processing (SIP),which has been completed looked, at building the internal capacity of NRW to Capture, Validate and Process the data. This project provided a lot of input to the ePlan Protocol and is now operational.
• EARL II is a Service Delivery project to enable the agency to produce and receive digital survey data. This project also has facets of engagement with the Survey Vendors and the Surveying Industry to provide tools to consume and produce digital data and to transfer these to the agency. Due to issues with digital signatures and approvals the outcome of this project will be a CIF and a rendering of that data that can be used to gain approvals for registration.
• EARL III relates to the digital approval of the CIF file and the removal of need for a paper plan.

This paper outlines the progress of the program and the lessons learnt and an outline of future activity.