The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM): Motivation, standardisation, application and further development
Introduction
This article is the introduction to a themed issue on the Land Administration Domain Model, the ISO 19152:2012 international standard. The importance of land administration as basis for a country’s suitable development by providing a basis for security of tenure, valuation and taxation, spatial planning, and land/resources management is first recaptured and put in a global perspective with actors such as UN-Habitat, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) and the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG). The needs for, and benefits of, a domain standard are next elaborated on. The ever increasing role of Information and Communication Technology in general and specific developments (such as 3 Dimensional and 4 Dimensional representations, semantic web-technology, mobile applications and more direct updating by actors, including the community) are among the functionality to be supported by future systems. This article also explains the LADM development process and history within FIG and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), and then looks forward to the maintenance and further development of the standard. This completes the scene and provides the background for the papers in this themed issue. In the second half of this article, the papers are introduced one by one and put into the above described context of standardization and future developments within land administration.
Section snippets
Land administration
Land administration supports the provision of security of tenure; it is a basis for valuation and taxation of property, for access to credit (as a basis for investment), for sustainable land use, minimisation of land conflicts, and better management of natural resources. Just like these issues benefit from proper land administration, land administration systems themselves benefit from proper data standards. In many countries the responsibilities and tasks in land administration are distributed
Domain standards
LADM is of one of the first spatial domain standards within ISO TC 211. TC 211 is the Technical Committee on Geographic Information within the ISO. There is a need for domain specific standardisation 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. This is required for communication between professionals, for system design, system
Global agenda
Land is a cross-cutting theme in the global development discourse. The UN Post-2015 Development Agenda (UN, 2012, UN, 2014a, UN, 2014b) includes consideration of land related issues across a wide range of objectives. Good land governance should also be seen as a means of supporting the global agenda such as the Post 2015 Agenda on ‘Realizing the Future We Want for All’ (UN, 2012). The vision includes issues relevant for development, implementation and use of land administration systems. For
Development of new land administration systems
The ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security’, the ‘continuum of land rights’ and ‘Fit-For-Purpose’ Land Administration require a flexible land administration system supported by a flexible legal framework recognising the different types of tenure. Recognising a variety of appropriate and legitimate land tenure forms should be based on an overview of the existing de facto and de jure land rights.
Further development of existing land administration systems
The use of Information and Communication Technology in society will further develop. The authors expect that by the year 2025 meaningful information exchange between different domains or disciplines will be possible at a global, national and local level. This information exchange will be based on several well-established domain standards as the LADM (Uitermark et al., 2010). The information infrastructure will provide the environment for integrated and ‘seamless’ access to several data sources
Semantic web-based content
The differences in (legal) concepts, terminology and languages which are used in the different Land Administration Systems still limits the access to and understanding of Land Administration data in an international context. However, legal concepts of the different countries will be formalised using semantic web technology, similar to all other kinds of knowledge. These formalized semantics are used in mapping between the concepts and terminology from different countries, allowing the users to
LADM development process
The design of LADM took place in an incremental approach with continuous expert reviewing from 2002 to 2006 within the International Federation of Surveyors. Then a design and development process for international standards was followed. The first step in this process was to confirm that a particular international standard is needed. For this purpose a New Work Item Proposal was submitted by the International Federation of Surveyors to the Technical Committee 211 of ISO and to the Technical
Maintenance and development of standards
The LADM standard is now being used, but it is inevitable that further issues will arise. These may range from detecting and correcting simple text errors, via omissions to further extension of the standard, e.g. extension of the legal model as suggested by Paasch (2012), or valuation/taxation extensions or moving informative code list values to normative parts of standards, possibly including semantic technologies for more precisely defining code list values; e.g. a semantic hierarchy. Within
Growing importance of 3D in the complete spatial development life-cycle
When considering the complete development life-cycle of rural and, in particular, urban areas, many related activities should often also support 3D representations (and not just the cadastral registration of the 3D spatial units associated with the correct RRRs and parties). Several of the activities and their information flows need to be structurally upgraded from 2D to 3D representations. Because this chain of activities requires good information flows between the various actors, it is
Community-driven cadastral mapping: updating by actors
The currently established update procedures are expected to be simplified in the future (Uitermark et al., 2010). For example, to split and sell a part of a parcel requires professionals, such as notaries, surveyors and registrars, each performing certain sub-tasks. Based on authenticated identification of persons and trusted reference material (e.g. high resolution and up-to-date geo-referenced imagery), via web-services, seller and buyer draw the new boundaries of the split part of the parcel
Overview of papers
This themed issue of Land Use Policy presents the use and further development of LADM from different perspectives. The guest editors have been working on the development of LADM since its inception. As part of this process several dedicated workshops were organised. In 2013 the first LADM workshop after the acceptance of LADM as an international standard was organised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with over 30 paper contributions. Based on reviews of these full papers, selected authors were invited
Conclusion
After more than a decade of development, the LADM became an international standard in 2012. This themed issue of Land Use Policy reflects on this process and its result, and presents the initial use and further developments of LADM. These are exciting times, as the phase of obtaining experiences with the LADM have now arrived, and first lessons learned can be obtained. The papers in this themed issue describes the state of the art of LADM use, and also indicates several areas for further
Acknowledgements
First of all the guest editors would like to thank to thank the reviewers (for their concise work, critically checking the papers and providing many suggestion to the authors for improving their papers) and the editor-in-chief for their support during the realisation of this themed issue on LADM in Land Use Policy. We would further like to thank the editorial committee drafting the ISO 19152 Land Administration Domain Model: Danilo Antonio and Solomon Haile (UN-HABITAT, Kenya); Antony Cooper
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ISO 19152 is at stage of final draft international standard