Cadastral parcel lookup methodology

Which official sources are used?

Urban and rural attributes come from the Dirección Nacional de Catastro alphanumeric file, published on 2026-08-07. Geometries come from the DNC parcel shapefiles, published on 2026-08-10. Streets, localities, street numbers and access points come from IDE Uruguay geographic addresses, published on 2026-08-01.

Government viewers and private tools are not scraped. Each download is checked for size, checksum, column structure and jurisdiction count before entering staging.

What is the correct key for a cadastral parcel?

An urban parcel is identified by DNC department + DNC cadastral locality + parcel number. Validation found 117,380 department-and-parcel combinations repeated across localities, so omitting the locality would cause real collisions. A rural parcel is identified by DNC department + parcel number.

Urban units also retain tenure regime, block, mezzanine/basement (EP/SS) and unit number. Indexable URLs for individual units are not created in the initial phases.

How are aggregates calculated?

Parcel counts use distinct parcel keys, not unit rows. Monetary statistics use the median because cadastral values have long-tailed distributions. Standard ownership, PH/UH units and rural parcels are calculated and published separately: adding or mixing these populations would produce a misleading figure.

Missing values are excluded from the statistics, and the exclusion count is retained. A parcel without geometry can be included in the alphanumeric total but not on the map; a shape without attributes remains marked as incomplete. Missing data is never replaced with zero.

How will address search work?

The IDE point is spatially matched to DNC parcels. In a deterministic sample of 19,000 addresses, 88.02% fell inside a parcel and 97.68% fell inside or within five meters. Since entrances may lie on the street or a boundary, the interface will distinguish exact, nearby and ambiguous matches, offering alternatives rather than silently choosing the first.

• Exact: a single polygon contains the point and has attributes.
• Nearby, high confidence: a single parcel is within five meters, with no tie.
• Alternatives: more than one exact parcel match, or a tie among nearby parcels.
• Nearby, low confidence: the distance is over 5 m and no more than 15 m; confirmation is required.
• Unconfirmed: alphanumeric data is missing, or no parcel is within 15 m.

How is the data updated and published?

The update is designed as download → validation → staging tables → integrity checks → transactional publication. Production does not read incomplete tables. If a run fails, the last published batch and its date are retained; if changes exceed the expected threshold, publication stops for manual review.

The process generates monthly snapshots to measure actual changes. The web VPS handles SSR and caching; heavy computation and PostGIS run alongside the data ETL, outside the website's critical request path.

License, attribution and transformations

Official data is reused under the Uruguay Open Data License. Providers: Dirección Nacional de Catastro and Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales. INGAR normalizes encoding and keys, integrates attributes with geometries and addresses, calculates statistical aggregates and publishes quality statuses. Source data is not presented as created by INGAR.

Stated limitations

• A source's publication date does not mean every record changed that day.
• Small differences exist between alphanumeric keys and shapes; missing matches are shown, not hidden.
• Cadastral values are for tax purposes and are not the property's market price.
• An address may correspond to more than one parcel or be located on a public road.
• The open data used does not include owners' names, and INGAR will not attempt to infer them.