A domain model for land administration

75% or the “people to land relationships” worldwide are not documented. This concerns about 4.5 billion cases. With a growing population this situation results in land disputes, land grabbing and neglecting of rights of local people. Land Administration provides documentation on people to land relationships. Land Administration is an instrument for implementation of Land Policies - part of governmental policy on environmental sustainability, economic development, disaster management, social justice and equity and political stability. Land Administration is in support to legal security (protection of land rights), access to credit (collateral for mortgage or micro credit), spatial planning, land tax and resource management (mining, forestry, and nature). Many countries have an incomplete, not up to date and therefore non-reliable land administration. Standards are needed in Land Administration, both for initial data acquisition and for data maintenance. Experience learns that it is not an easy task to design and set up a land administration. In many countries modelling expertise to set up Land Administration Systems is lacking. It should be noted that those systems contain high volumes of data. In this thesis a common standard for the land administration domain is designed and proposed for implementation. Such a standard is in support to development of software applications and this will accelerate the development and implementation of proper land administration in support to sustainable development. The International Standard is expected to be published as ISO standard in August 2012, a breakthrough in the development of this type of systems. There is already recognition and support by FAO, UN HABITAT and several countries.GIS TechnologyOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

First experiences with a high-resolution imagery-based adjudication approach in Ethiopia

Great progress has been made with rural land certification in Ethiopia. This process, however, has been mainly confined to the first phase certificates – those without a georeference. In 2008, a team conducted a simple field test using high resolution imagery. On-site tests were performed to determine if Quickbird satellite imagery could be used to establish parcel index maps in selected villages. The data collection in the field was performed with the help of land rights holders and local officials. The image quality of the plots at a scale of 1:2000 was sufficiently high to allow the parties to easily understand the images and contribute input, making the process very participatory. Many land rights holders were not able to present their certificates, suggesting updating issues. Even though the test was not well prepared, it yielded useful experiences and data. This limited data set was processed initially with ArcGIS and later with the first prototype of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), which is open-source software. Processing the limited graphical display of the boundaries was relatively easy, but trying to link the data to Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates (collected, at the same time, with hand-held GPS) was not immediately possible due to offsets caused by a number of reasons. Nevertheless, the approach seems very useful for lower land value areas where coverage is more important than (absolute) accuracy.Geo-information and Land DevelopmentOTB Research Institut

LADM and its role in establishing cadastral systems

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The Land Administration Domain Model Standard

LADM is a international standard for the land administration domain. It will stimulate the development of software applications and will accelerate the implementation of proper land administration systems that will support sustainable development. The LADM covers basic information-related components of land administration (including those over water and land, and elements above and below the surface of the earth); The standard provides an abstract, conceptual model with three packages related to: - parties (people and organizations); - basic administrative units, rights, responsibilities, and restrictions (ownership rights); - spatial units (parcels, and the legal space of buildings and utility networks); with sub packages for spatial sources (surveying), and spatial representations (geometry and topology). This paper summarizes the motivation, requirements and goals for developing LADM. Further, the standard itself is described, including the development process and potential future maintenance. Despite being a very young standard, ‘born’ on 1 December 2012, it is already possible to observe some of the impact of LADM and some examples of this are given in the paper.OTB ResearchOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

ISO 19512: The land administration domain model

Focus of this paper is on the Land Administration Domain Model which is under development as an International Standard at ISO. This development is an initiative of the International Federation of Surveyors – FIG. The International Standard is expected to be published in 2012. Why is this development important? What is the scope of the standard, what is included and what is not included? There will be a brief overview of the contents of the standard with attention to its core packages and to the relation to other standards (such as data quality aspects and surveying). The idea is that not only the field-survey based, high accurate, cadastral maps are supported by this standard. This would otherwise mean that many approaches would be excluded and the world is absolutely not waiting for that. On the contrary, many high accurate approaches are slow and expensive and proven not to work. A specialization of the standard, the so called “Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM)” will be introduced. This is a flexible approach to pro poor land administration on a participatory basis. The flexibility is in the unconventional options for descriptions of spatial units, parties and relations between spatial units and parties. This means informal and customary relations between people and land can be included: land administration for everyone in a local environment – not necessarily linked to formal systems but with options for future integration.OTB ReseachOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

Trends in spatial domain standards

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Standard for land administration approved by ISO

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ISO 19152:2012, LADM Expected Impact (abstract)

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The final steps towards an international standard for land administration

The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) moved forward to the FDIS stage (FDIS = Final Draft International Standard): ISO FDIS 19152. This is the last stage before becoming an International Standard (expected in July 2012), after a four year standards development process within ISO/TC211 (Geographic Information) and six years of preparation within the FIG, while the original idea for such a standard was launched at the 2002 FIG congress in Washington D.C. This paper presents an overview of the last (sometimes minor) modifications from DIS to FDIS. Most modifications are improvements to increase the flexibility of the LADM, e.g. the relationships between rights and arbitrary sets of spatial units (parcels). Consequently, with more flexibility, the notion of conformance testing has been adjusted. Also, the ever increasing adoption of the LADM is illustrated via a number of new country profiles. This clearly shows the need, and practically, the growing support for the LADM over the past years (in addition to the ever growing number of positive votes for the LADM within ISO).OTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

Specialization of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM): Modelling on non-formal RRR

This paper proposes a more detailed classification of the legal part of the LADM, ISO 19152, (i.e. interests in land) than possible in the current standard (ISO, 2012) today and is an attempt to raise awareness of the possibilities to further develop the LADMs ‘right’, ‘restriction’ and ‘responsibility’ classes (RRR). The term ‘land’ is here used for land, water and air. The LADM does, in principle, already facilitate the modelling of e.g. informal and customary rights. However, there has, to the authors’ knowledge, not yet been any approach that incorporates non formal social tenure relationships, such as informal occupation, tenancy based on non-formal and informal rights and customary rights into the LADM. This paper uses the non-formal rights descriptions in the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) as an input to further develop the LADM. In this paper the authors base their research on an extended classification of the LADMs RRR classes presented at the FIG Working Week in Nigeria (Paasch et al., 2013). The extension is based on the newly developed Legal Cadastral Domain Model, LCDM (Paasch, 2012a), as a conceptual basis for adding an additional level to the LADM classification. The LCDM states that interests in land can be classified according to whether they are limiting or beneficial to real property ownership. The extended classification is further based on the paradigm that there are two major types of interest in land, privately agreed interests and regulations imposed by a public agency to further the interests of society. This paper contains a discussion on how the legal part of the LADM can be expanded. Furthermore, the “code list” issue addressed in the FIG 2013 Working Week paper is further researched in this paper, e.g. how to develop the code lists for refined LCDM classes (based on specialisations), that could/should be used. The incorporation of a specialized description of non-formal rights in the LADM may be of future value when (if) more detailed information on social tenure land use has to be stored in national or international land administration registers. The LADM allows national specializations to be added to the standard, however, such specializations may be useful when used within a nation, but are of rather limited value when more detailed data of interests in land has to be exchanged internationally. This would require international maintenance of code tables.OTB ResearchOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen