A Domain Standard for Land Administration

This paper presents the design of a Domain Model for Land Administration (LA). As a result a formal International Standard is available: ISO 19152 Geographic Information – Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) (ISO, 2012). Domain specific standardisation is needed to capture the semantics of the land administration domain on top of the agreed foundation of basic standards for geometry, temporal aspects, metadata and also observations and measurements from the field. A standard is required for communication between professionals, for system design, system development and system implementation purposes and for purposes of data exchange and quality management of data. Such a standard will enable GIS (Geographic Information System) and DBMS (Data Base Management System) providers and/or open source communities to develop products and appli¬cations for Land Administration purposes. And in turn this will enable land registry and cadastral organisations to use the components of the standard to develop, implement and maintain systems in an even more efficient way. The research objective is to design a Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) for Land Administration System (LAS) development. Such a LADM has to be broadly accepted and it should be adaptable to local situations (Lemmen, 2012). It has to be usable to organise Land Administration data within a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The design is based on the common pattern of 'people – land' relationships. The model should be as simple as possible, it should cover the basic data related components of Land Administration (legal/administrative, mapping and surveying) and it should satisfy user requirements. The Domain Model in its imple¬mentation is can be distributed over different organisations with different tasks and responsibilities. The research does not focus on the legal, political, economic, institutional or financial aspects of Land Administration and Land Administration organisations; at least as far as those are not related to user requirements for the model. Taxation, valuation and land use are knowledge fields in itself and are not within the focus of research. In this paper first the motivation and background of the research are presented, followed by the formulation of goals of LADM. Then the model is introduced, followed by an evaluation. Conclusions are presented and attention is given to options for future work.