Land administration is an ongoing concern in many countries of the world and less than 30% of the landcover is properly titled or surveyed. This lack leads to insecurity of tenure, economic barriers, land grabbing and is a major problem to resolving land conflicts. Land administration frameworks have to support a wide variety of regulatory and policy environments and interoperability is key in providing the necessary flexibility. In order to avoid the creation of yet another set of data silos OGC members set out to form a Domain Working Group (DWG) on Land Administration as a forum to explore existing interoperability standards and best practices in this domain. The presentation will focus on this newly established working group and introduce to some of the key points of interest. While there are some standards describing elements of an administrative system (for example ISO LADM), there is no consistent use of geospatial description of land records or adequate rules for defining and describing the quality of the records. The group will work to provide a common vocabulary for the locational aspects of land administration databases and will also be a forum for connecting suitable technology for data linkage and quality assessment. Some of the key players in the Land Administration domain have created Open Source tools like FLOSS SOLA (FAO) and STDM (GLTN and UN Habitat) which are based on core OSGeo technology and already make extensive use OGC standards. |