The first step in this quest must be to identify the components of data, technology and science that can be immediately leveraged. With this foundation in place, industry stakeholders, regulators and governments can begin to shape policy and practice that can apply these tools to improve property identification in their respective spheres of influence. A data standard, such as the Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization (MISMO) seeks only to provide a vehicle to express and change data in a common, understandable way; it is not a database or a collection of information. And, data standards provide the language that allows disparate data sources on different database structures to have a means to more easily talk to one another. But, true cross-industry and cross-platform participation is needed to realize this vision. 

In September 2012, MISMO initiated a Development Workgroup and invited industry representatives to talk about current challenges and possible enhancements to improve the MISMO data standard’s support for property location identification, verification and best practices. The current version of the MISMO Reference Model (3.2) contains the generally accepted data points for property identification including postal address, legal description and parcel identifiers. The MISMO Property ID Development Workgroup was formed to consider the issues and challenges faced by the industry today in the realm of property identification as it relates to all aspects of residential mortgage lending and to evaluate new techniques, data and solutions that may be applicable for support through expansion of the MISMO data standard. 

Several mortgage industry participants including lenders, technology vendors, regulators and other standards bodies have participated in an open dialog about the various challenges with property identification and how technology and data could be leveraged in a way to serve the common good. There have been two key contributors to the discussion. The Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA) who has stepped forward and drafted three very comprehensive, spatially-aware, non-proprietary formulas such that a globally unique number can be calculated and matched to GPS coordinates and expressed as Keyhole Markup Language (KML). 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) manages the KML standard, which is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole Inc., which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the OGC in 2008 and is the data standard used by both Microsoft and Google.