I worked on a tool to digitize the German land registry, only to later get notified that they already had such a tool, so my work was completely useless. Worked on that for about 8 months, at least I got a bit of payment because I did it on the job. Currently the digitization of the German land registry is done in PDF format, which is of course horrible and my taxes are right now paying for people manually copying and pasting text from PDF documents.

I was employed as a simple office clerk (I had failed to start my own startup and needed any job to get some money at the time) and was told to do the same as everyone else, copying text from the PDF, rewriting the text according to legal guidelines and pasting it into an ArcGIS-based software. Meanwhile the ArcGIS-based software I was supposed to paste into crashed every 30 minutes. So the only way I saw to actually do my job was to write a digitization tool for the PDF documents. Since I had internal access to government documents (which aren't publicly available to anyone of course) I saw it as a way to build my portfolio and put the project on my resume to find a better job afterwards (which I did). I had a good manager who allowed me sudo access (my state used Linux, yay!), so I got to work.

After about 6 months I had a full GUI tool written and digitized about 100 PDF files. The software can digitize from PDF to JSON, then ran a python.wasm VM over the digitized JSON in order to rewrite the texts according to the (constantly changing) legal guidelines. Then I also "hacked" the ArcGIS-based software with a HTTP middleman logging server and found out that it was just submitting XML requests to an endpoint, so I wrote a tool to batch upload the JSON documents directly into the database instead of having to launch ArcGIS. In the end I also wrote a management server that used libgit2 to create diffs between legal document (i.e. creating Grundbuchänderungsmitteilungen via git diff), I am very proud of this because it's cool, although the chance of ever getting official approval was almost zero (but hey I thought it was cool).

I was hoping I could somehow sell my tool and support for it to the government, since the project of land registry digitization has currently taken over 20 years[1] and it's still not finished. Apparently the problem is that some bureaucrats want to make the absolute perfect data model and only release the software once the data model is perfect (which is basically never going to happen). My approach of making an extensible JSON-based model for now to just translate the PDFs - and then adapting it for use-cases later was rejected because, well, I am not a multi-million dollar company and I sadly failed to impress the government with my skills. Long story short, after about 8 months of work I was given rights to my program (even though I wrote it on government payroll, technically) but it was rejected. Oh well, at least I got a nice academic article[2] avoided shooting my brain out from boredom copying and pasting text and also advanced my career somewhat.

In case anyone needs such a tool, it's licensed GPL3 over at https://grundbuch-test.eu/

[1] https://www.grundbuch.eu/nachrichten/

[2] https://geodaesie.info/zfv/zfv-archiv/zfv-147-jahrgang/zfv-2... (page 4)