Spatially referenced legal property objects

Abstract Delivering sustainable development requires effective management of social, environmental and economic aspects of land. Historically, land administration systems have contributed to this by recording and organising interests in land, primarily through land registration, land mapping, land valuation and land development subsystems. Unfortunately these subsystems have established diversified services and functions to manage interests in land each from their own perspective, and often operate in unconnected information silos. Interoperability between these information silos is impeded by use of often incoherent and unique identifiers in the data models used in each subsystem. Delivery of sustainability in the wider sense is adversely affected by an inability to exchange land information between subsystems. At the same time, land administration systems are not sufficiently flexible to accommodate or support the growing number of complex commodities (water, biota, mining, carbon credits, etc.) and other interests (environmental, heritage, use restrictions) in land. This inflexibility is caused by traditional concentration on a data model based that is on the physical land parcel (the cadastral parcel) as a single means of organising land information. To address these problems, this paper proposes that the data model based on the physical land parcel be replaced by a spatially referenced data model based on the legal property object. The proposed data model is more comprehensive, capable of organising a wider range of interests, and should facilitate wider exchange of information. The legal property object is open-ended and can include complex commodities and all kinds of rights, restrictions and responsibilities. Spatially referencing these objects facilitates interoperability among the subsystems. The key for putting the proposed model into practice is the use of spatial identifiers to regulate relationships among legal property objects.